Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation

Transcription

Beyond the Frame
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Beyond the Frame
Women of Color and Visual
Representation
Edited by
Neferti X. M. Tadiar
and
Angela Y. Davis
BEYOND THE FRAME
© Neferti X. M. Tadiar and Angela Y. Davis, 2005.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any
manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief
quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
First published in 2005 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN™
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PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave
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Macmillan® is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom
and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European
Union and other countries.
ISBN 1–4039–6533–1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Beyond the frame : women of color and visual representation / edited
by Angela Y. Davis and Neferti X.M. Tadiar.
p. cm.
Papers originally presented at a conference sponsored by the Humanities
Research Institute, University of California, Santa Cruz, entitled “Women of
Color and Visual Representations” held in spring of 1999.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1–4039–6533–1 (alk. paper)
1. Minority women—United States—Social conditions—Congresses.
2. Photography of women—United States—Congresses. 3. Marginality,
Social—United States—Congresses. I. Davis, Angela Y. II. Tadiar, Neferti
Xina M. (Neferti Xina Maca), 1964–
HQ1421.B49 2005
305.48⬘8⬘00973—dc22
2005043132
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: September 2005
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America.
For Gloria E. Anzaldúa
Contents
List of Figures
ix
About the Contributors and Editors
xi
Introduction
Neferti X. M. Tadiar and Angela Y. Davis
1
Part 1 Popular Culture and Advertising
1. “The East Side Revue, 40 Hits by East Los Angeles
Most Popular Groups!” The Boys in the Band and
the Girls Who Were Their Fans
Keta Miranda
2. The Commoditization of Hybridity
in the 1990s U.S. Fashion Advertising:
Who Is cK one?
Laura J. Kuo
13
31
3. Albita’s Queer Nations and U.S. Salsa Culture
Darshan Elena Campos
49
4. Beyond Pocahontas
Joanne Barker
61
5. “Come Up to the Kool Taste”: Race and the
Semiotics of Smoking
Sarah S. Jain
Part II
77
Self/Identity, Memory/History
6. Conjuring up Traces of Historical
Violence: Grandpa, Who is Not in the Photo
Naono Akiko
107
viii
Contents
7. “The Face Value of Dreams”: Gender, Race, Class,
and the Politics of Cosmetic Surgery
Victoria M. Bañales
8. A Fraction of National Belonging: “Hybrid
Hawaiians,” Blood Quantum, and the Ongoing
Search for Purity
J. Ke-haulani Kauanui
Part III
131
153
Resistance Images
9. Bearing Bandoleras: Transfigurative
Liberation and the Iconography
of la Nueva Chicana
Maylei Blackwell
171
10. Aztec Princess Still at Large
Catrióna Rueda Esquibel
197
11. Embodied at the Shrine of Cultural Disjuncture
Luz Calvo
207
12. “¿Soy Punkera, Y Que?”: Sexuality, Translocality,
and Punk in Los Angeles and Beyond
Michelle Habell-Pallán
219
Index
243
List of Figures
1.1 Front cover of East Side Revue: 40 Hits by
East Los Angeles Most Popular Groups!
2.1 “Jenny, Kate, and Company,” prototype for
the cK one: portraits of a generation advertising
campaign, released in September 1994
3.1 Albita: No Se Parce A Nada
3.2 Albita: Una Mujer Como Yo
4.1 “A New Kind of Warrior,” U.S. Secret Service
Advertisement
5.1 Cover (L) and Inside Cover of Ebony, August 1967
6.1 Late Spring 1972; from top left (clockwise):
Grandma’s elder sister, Grandma, Dad, my
brother, myself, Mom
7.1 Ana Ponce exits a plastic surgeon’s office in Lima,
Peru after undergoing rhinoplasty
8.1 “Chinese-Hawaiian Girl,” 1930 photograph
included in papers of William A. Lessa, National
Anthropological Archives
9.1 “La Soldadera,” Chicana Student Movement
newspaper, 1968
10.1 “Ixta Ponders Leverage Buyout,” Robert Buitrón, 1989
11.1 Laura Aguilar’s Three Eagles Flying
12.1 Flyer insert for Pretty Vacant (dir. Jim Mendiola, 1996)
12.2 Still photo for Pretty Vacant (dir. Jim Mendiola, 1996)
14
33
51
58
62
82
109
132
155
172
198
208
220
222
A doctoral student in Literature at the University of California-Santa
Cruz, Vicky Bañales is finishing her dissertation, entitled “Twentieth
Century Latin American and US Latina Women’s Literature and the
Paradox of Dictatorship and Democracy.” Her research interests
include: Latin/a American women’s dictatorship novels and testimonial narratives, women’s social and literary movements in the 1980s,
Third World feminisms, and gender and race studies. Vicky has been a
member of the Research Cluster for Women of Color in Collaboration
and Conflict since 1997, and is affiliated with the UC-Santa Cruz
Chicano/Latino Research Center and the Feminist Theories in the
Latin/a Americas Research Cluster. She teaches women’s studies and
literature/writing courses at UC-Santa Cruz, and is a past Ford
Dissertation Fellow.
Joanne Barker (Lenape) completed her Ph.D. in the History of
Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa
Cruz, in 2000 where she specialized in indigenous jurisprudence,
women’s/gender studies, and cultural studies. She has published articles
in Wicazo Sa Review: A Native American Studies Journal, Cultural
Studies, Inscriptions, and This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions
for Transformation. She has edited a collection of essays entitled
Sovereignty Matters that is being published by the University of
Nebraska Press for 2005. She is currently working on energy policies
and conservation issues in relation to California Indian tribes with the
California Energy Commission and California Indian Legal Services.
She is Assistant Professor in American Indian Studies at San Francisco
State University.
Maylei Blackwell is Assistant Professor in the César E. Chávez
Center for Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los
Angeles. She is an activist-scholar whose research examines how racial
xii
and sexual difference shapes the challenges and possibilities of
transnational organizing in the Americas. She completed a Ph.D. in the
History of Consciousness Department at the University of California
in Santa Cruz. Her current research and teaching explore how women
of color in the United States and indigenous women in Mexico organize to resist the conditions created by globalization. Her recent publications include “Contested Histories: las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc,
Chicana Feminisms and Print Culture in the Chicano Movement,
1968–1973,” in Chicana Feminisms: A Critical Reader (Duke
University Press), a coauthored article entitled, “Encountering Latin
American and Caribbean Feminisms,” which appeared in Signs,
Journal of Women in Culture and Society (Winter 2002), and Time to
Rise: US Women of Color—Issues and Strategies, a report to the UN
World Conference Against Racism, available at ⬍www.coloredgirls.
org⬎, which she coedited for the Women of Color Resource
Center.
Luz Calvo is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at California State
University, East Bay. She earned her Ph.D. in the History of
Consciousness at UC Santa Cruz. Her article “Art Comes for the
Archbishop: The Semiotics of Contemporary Chicana Feminism”
appears in Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism (Autumn
2004). She is working on a manuscript entitled, “Border Fantasies:
Race, Sex, and Mexican Bodies.”
Darshan Elena Campos is a media arts educator. Activism fuels her
scholarship. She programs cultural events and writes as often as possible. Social justice, which means political, social, cultural, and psychic
liberation for all oppressed and colonized peoples, is her goal. Her dissertation considers independent women of color filmmaking as a form
of cultural criticism and grassroots political organizing. She is a Ph.D.
candidate in the Department of History of Consciousness at University
of California, Santa Cruz.
Catrióna Rueda Esquibel is Assistant Professor of Ethnic Studies at
San Francisco State University. Her work has been published in
SIGNS: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, Chicano/Latino
Homoerotic Identities, Tortilleras: Hispanic and Latina Lesbian
Expression, Velvet Barrios: Popular Culture and Chicana/Chicano
Sexualities, and in her book, With Her Machete in Her Hand: Reading
Chicana Lesbians (University of Texas Press, 2006).
xiii
Michelle Habell-Pallán is Assistant Professor in the Department of
American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington, Seattle. She
is author of Loca Motion: The Travels of Chicana and Latina Popular
Culture (NYU Press) and coeditor with Mary Romero of Latino/a
Popular Culture (NYU Press). She is a recipient of research fellowships
from the Rockefeller and Mellon Foundations. Her book-in-progress
is a comparative study of women of color’s participation in the punk
and new wave music cultures of the 1970s.
Sarah S. Jain is Assistant Professor in the Department of Social and
Cultural Anthropology at Stanford University. Her publications
include Injury, Princeton University Press, 2005.
_
J. Kehaulani Kauanui is Assistant Professor in American Studies and
Anthropology at Wesleyan University in Connecticut. In 2000, she
earned her Ph.D. in the program of History of Consciousness at the
University of California, Santa Cruz. Kauanui has been awarded
several fellowships supporting her research and writing, including
those by the Woodrow Wilson National Fellowship Foundation,
the University of California Pacific Rim Grant, the Smithsonian, the
Rockefeller Archives Center Research Grant, the National Science
Foundation, and the School of American Research. She is currently
completing her first book, The Politics of Hawaiian Blood and the
Question of Sovereignty. She has numerous publications which appear
in the following journals: American Studies, Political and Legal
Anthropology Review, Social Text, Women’s Studies International
Forum, Amerasia Journal, Pacific Studies, and The Contemporary
Pacific. With Dr. Caroline Sinavaiana, she is coediting a forthcoming
special issue of Pacific Studies called “Women Writing Oceania:
Weaving the Sails of the Waka.”
Laura J. Kuo is Assistant Professor and Program Director of Theory as
Practice in the Department of Fine Arts at Otis College of Art and
Design in Los Angeles, California. Her research has been supported by
the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program
Fellowship in Critical Studies, the Bolin Predoctoral Fellowship in
Women’s Studies at Williams College, and the Institute of American
Cultures Postdoctoral Fellowship in Asian American Studies at UCLA.
Kuo’s current research explores the transnational underpinnings of
post-9-11 activist art by Arab/Muslim/Iranian/American artists
addressing Western imperialism in Central and Southwest Asia and
North Africa in their work. Articles, including “Transnationalism,
xiv
About the Contributors
Interdependency, and Consciousness in the Art of Abdelali Dahrouch:
‘Desert Sin, Revisited,’ ” have been published in Third Text and
Estrago; she has published numerous reviews in art catalogues and
magazines, and has articles and reviews forthcoming in the art journal
X-tra and in Third Text. Kuo is currently developing a manuscript
entitled, Contested Visions: Transnational Cartographies of
Feminism, Multiculturalism, and Postmodernism in Contemporary
Cultural Production.
Marie (Keta) Miranda is Assistant Professor at the University of
Texas, San Antonio in the Mexican American Studies Program in the
Bicultural-Bilingual Studies Department in the College of Education.
She graduated from the History of Consciousness Department at the
University of California at Santa Cruz in 2000. She is the author of a
study of girls’ culture, entitled Homegirls in the Public Sphere
(University of Texas Press, 2003).
Naono Akiko is Associate Professor of Graduate School of Social and
Cultural Studies at the University of Kyushu, Japan. She received her
Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of California, Santa Cruz. She
has been a post-doctoral fellow at the Japan Society for the Promotion
of Science, a visiting research fellow at the Hiroshima Peace Institute
and she established and served as the Project Director of the Nuclear
History Institute at American University in Washington, D.C., a project that won the North American Association of Summer Sessions
Award for Creative and Innovative Programs. She is the author of
“Genbaku No E” To Deau: Komerareta Omoi Ni Mimiwo Sumashite
[Encountering the drawings of the atomic bomb survivors] (Tokyo:
Iwanami shoten: 2004) and Hiroshima/Amerika: Genbakuten Wo
Megutte [Hiroshima/America: on the atomic bomb exhibit] (Hiroshima:
Keisui sha, 1997), which won the 1997 Award of the Peace and
Cooperative Journalist Fund of Japan.
About the Editors
Angela Y. Davis is known internationally for her ongoing work to
combat all forms of oppression in the United States and abroad. Over
the years she has been active as a student, teacher, writer, scholar, and
activist/organizer. She is a living witness to the historical struggles of
the contemporary era. Professor Davis’s long-standing commitment to
prisoners’ rights dates back to her involvement in the campaign to free
the Soledad Brothers, which led to her own arrest and imprisonment.
About the Contributors
xv
Today she remains an advocate of prison abolition and has developed
a powerful critique of racism in the criminal justice system. She is a
member of the Advisory Board of the Prison Activist Resource Center,
and currently is working on a comparative study of women’s imprisonment in the United States, the Netherlands, and Cuba. She is the
author of five books, including Angela Davis: An Autobiography;
Women, Race, and Class; Blues Legacies and Black Feminism:
Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday; and The
Angela Y. Davis Reader.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Associate Professor of History of Consciousness
at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She is the author of FantasyProduction: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for
the New World Order (Hong Kong University Press, 2004) and Things
Fall Away: Philippine Literature, Historical Experience and Tangential
Makings of Globality (forthcoming from Duke University Press). Her
work broadly addresses questions about the role of gender, race, and
sexuality in discourses and material practices of nationalism, transnationalism, and globalization, as well as explores the potential of nonWestern knowledges for thinking about the politics of minoritarian
cultural practices. She was the project director of “Feminisms and
Global War,” the inaugural project of the Institute for Advanced
Feminist Research.
Introduction
Neferti X. M.Tadiar and Angela Y. Davis
A History and Project of Collaboration
and Coalition
Beyond the Frame emerges out of the vision and hard work of a group
of graduate students actively involved in the Research Cluster for the
Study of Women of Color in Conflict and Collaboration based at
the University of California, Santa Cruz. As both contributors to this
anthology and members of the editorial collective (originally composed of Victoria Bañales, Luz Calvo, Cecilia Cruz, J. Kehaulani
Kauanui, and Keta Miranda), these students, many of who are now
assistant professors at other universities, are entirely responsible for
the conceptualization of this collaborative project, which seeks to
interrogate dominant regimes of visual representation from the perspectives of women of color feminist criticism. They also solicited the
papers and organized the Humanities Research Institute–sponsored
conference, “Women of Color and Visual Representations,” held in
the Spring of 1999, where the initial papers were read, discussed, and
critiqued by invited scholars in a collaborative effort to sharpen the
political intervention which they sought to make. Such an intervention
was articulated by the contributors themselves as “a critical interruption of the conception of ‘women of color’ identities as a historical,
fixed, or essential” through the interrogation of photographic images.
The choice of photographs as a point of departure was predicated on
the recognition that processes of identity-formation are mediated by
images—and indeed reified in and through photographs. The contributors are also interested in exploring how such identity-images are
pressed into service for the dominant realisms of our time. In critically
engaging a single photograph, each essay attempts therefore to look at
2
those complex processes of identity-production and subject-formation,
which shape both dominant and alternative meanings of the chosen
image—to look, in other words, at what moves and takes place
“beyond the frame” as a constitutive aspect of what is inside of it.
As a project undertaken by the Research Cluster for the Study of
Women of Color, Beyond the Frame is the product not of an isolated
initiative, but rather of a social and political context and community.
The University of California at Santa Cruz has been the site of significant work by women of color feminist critics, most notably Gloria
Anzaldúa and Chela Sandoval, but also a great many more scholars,
activists, and students involved in the connected struggles against
racist, sexist, and homophobic forms of domination. Since its founding
in 1991, the Cluster has attempted to introduce visual images into
debates around the meaning of the category “women of color.” Thus
this project is linked to such efforts as the annual Women of Color Film
and Video Festival, founded by a former Cluster member, Margaret R.
Daniel, which has been screening films and videos by, about, and for
women of color for more than a decade. The work of such artists as
Lourdes Portillo, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Pratibha Parmar, Renee TajimaPeña, Sylvia Morales, and Julie Dash, has helped to constitute a community of images that have shaped new social and political identities,
as well as critiques of identity-based politics. Engagement with this
work has encouraged scholarly and popular reflection on what it
means to self-consciously inhabit image environments.
The Cluster has also sponsored a multiyear curriculum development project, which has resulted in the offering of three undergraduate courses on women of color: the first focused on genders and
sexualities, the second on visual representation, and the third on
violence. What this present project has in common with these other
activities, besides a “common context of struggle,” is a commitment to
a politicized and politicizing education that is interdisciplinary and
antiracist. Indeed, one of the aims of this present anthology is to provide a broad audience with accessible critical tools necessary for the
transformative understanding of the images that fundamentally shape
the media-dominated society in which we live.
This anthology thus reflects historical and contemporary conversations about scholarly, artistic, and organizing strategies associated
with women of color feminism. The methodological insistence on
multiple, concurrent, interlinked modes of analysis emerged precisely
in order to develop otherwise unavailable understandings of “women
of color.” At the same time, as the contributors to this anthology
Introduction
3
recognize, the object “women of color” was itself constituted through
these crosscutting, intersectional analytical and organizing strategies.
In other words, even as we tend to employ the term “women of color”
to refer to women or groups of women who are located by dominant
racisms at the margins of the social order, this anthology rejects such
easy, positivistic assumptions. Indeed, what is most important about
this term is its theoretical and practical imperative to bring together
such categories as gender, race, class, sexuality, and nation, asking
how they always work in mutually constitutive relations.
In so far as the designation “women of color” is a political category
emerging out of U.S.-based struggles, it cannot be expected to travel
easily beyond these national boundaries. Nevertheless, within this
context it has enabled a political coalition of diverse, particular histories of struggle—Native American, Chicana/o, African American,
Hawaiian, Asian American, as well as immigrant Third World women
struggles. These alliances have not been without their share of contradictions and tensions. Indeed, the essays in this volume continue the
practice within the research cluster itself of exploring the productive
force of those contradictions and tensions, which emanate from the
diverse, particular histories out of which the political formation of
women of color emerges. It bears repeating that the category of
women of color does not pertain to a collection of racialized women.
The essays challenge this very notion by analyzing the ways in which
women of color are fixed as unchanging, intrinsic, and exchangeable
identities within dominant cultural representations. One of the ways
that they accomplish this is through placing emphasis on the different
histories that comprise, challenge, and escape any unifying narrative
of liberal, multiculturalist democracy. The essays also foreground the
processes of production of racial, gender, and sexual difference, and
the ways that these historical differences have been deployed both by
state and civil apparatuses to secure various cultural logics of domination and by marginalized social groups struggling against those cultural
logics to bring about social transformation.
With the exception of Akiko Naono’s essay, which is most explicitly
situated outside of, though certainly in relation with, the U.S. context,
most of these essays are located in U.S.-based struggles. Nevertheless,
because of their critical positions in relation to U.S. hegemony, as a
consequence of long and continuing histories of marginalization and
colonization, all of these essays necessarily interrogate the naturalized
unity and borders of the U.S. nation, not to mention the figural practices of an insidious U.S. nationalism. For example, Kehaulani Kauanui
4
and Joanne Barker highlight the histories of colonization of Hawaiian
and Native American peoples within the United States; Luz Calvo and
Catrióna Esquibel write on and about the borders of hegemonic U.S.
national fantasies; and Maylei Blackwell, Michelle Habell-Pallán, and
Darshan Campos underscore the constitutive role of transnational
movements across the Americas and Africa in the production of counterimages and alternative socialities. In effect, the essays attempt to
find new places from which to interpret the images before them, places
that are necessarily “beyond the frame” of the dominant U.S. nation.
Women of Color and Visual Images
All of these essays present critical interdisciplinary readings of photographic images inasmuch as gender, racial, and sexual structures of
oppression and domination are deeply shaped not only by such images
but also more generally by orders of visual representation. In doing so
they also reflect on the complex processes of visuality, or of seeing and
being seen, and their relation to social power. While a couple of contributors are located in visual studies, most are writing out of different
disciplines. The goal of this project in fostering such crossing of disciplinary borders is the understanding and viewing of visual representations not as a matter of scholarly expertise, but rather as a manner of
creating and exercising historical agency. This means developing a
kind of fluency that includes but is not limited to what might canonically be understood to be theories of the visual. Indeed, one of the goals
of the book is to encourage a new kind of popular fluency in reading
images, a fluency that intersects with but is not fully contained within
the disciplines of visual studies, such as art history and film theory.
The contributors draw their methodological tools for reading images
from the broader, multidisciplinary critical interpretative practices of
antiracist, feminist writing. Their analyses do not only issue out of an
awareness of the conventions of normative interpretation—dominant,
gendered, racialized, and sexualized ways of seeing and reading
images. In order to further enabling practices of understanding our
visual environments, these analyses also greatly depend on alternative
interpretative categories provided by communities in struggle. For
example, in the context of reading the image of an American Indian
Warrior Woman used in a U.S. Secret Service advertisement, Joanne
Barker, takes “sovereignty and cultural autonomy as the primary
frames of reference for a hermeneutics of Indian women’s representations.” Barker develops an investigative path that diverges from the
Introduction
5
familiar one of “getting to the facts” and from the familiar, putative
history presented by the figure of Pocahontas. Informed and inspired
by the political interpretative strategies of other Indian women, her
investigative path leads, instead, to a deconstruction of the facts and a
story of how history might be otherwise. By drawing on interpretative
categories used by communities in struggle, these essays thus contribute important sources of hermeneutical tools for reading images.
Very importantly then, the development of visual literacy also
means rethinking the category of “visual theory” through “women of
color.” In this regard, “women of color” stands less as a racialized,
gendered identity and more as a set of critical reading strategies or a
problematic implying particular modes of theoretical and political
analysis for addressing racializing, sexualizing, and gendering forms of
oppression. These critical reading strategies, which are forged through
the inflection of “visual theory” by “women of color,” thus fundamentally relate to other important paradigms associated with scholarly
work on, about, and by women of color such as “differential consciousness” (Chela Sandoval) “intersectionality” (Kimberlé Crenshaw)
and “border consciousness” (Gloria Anzaldúa), even as they address
intersecting social and political concerns of postcolonial, Third World,
and transnational feminisms, queer studies, and cultural studies. Such
scholarly work associated with women of color feminism has
attempted to acknowledge the very histories of struggle that have
enabled these theoretical concepts, histories that are unfortunately
often disappeared by narrow academic citational practices. By not
confining their contexts of theoretical reference to particular academic
disciplines and fields and drawing on analytical tools they acknowledge as the product of communities of struggle, the essays in this book
show themselves to be interdisciplinary in a broader sense. It is this
enlargement of citational practices by women of color feminism that
we need to encourage among emerging scholars.
The strategies for confronting and interrogating images used by the
book’s contributors include the placing of seemingly static or frozen
products of visual culture back into the dynamics of history. One strategy is to foreground the erasures and rewriting of “other” histories that
dominant representational practices, as embodied by the photographs,
accomplish. Laura Kuo writes about the work of “hiding” relations of
exploitation and histories of struggle that are carried out by images of
hybridity and multiculturalism in Calvin Klein advertisements. She
demonstrates, moreover, the psychic and social ambivalence and
difference that the postmodern liberalism of the ads depend on and
6
co-opt but that also harbor possibilities for subversive appropriation.
In this way, Kuo points to a wider history of social contestation in
which the photograph takes part. In her essay on a photograph accompanying a news article on cosmetic surgery in Peru, Vicky Bañales also
writes about the “hidden” power relations underpinning both the
actual phenomenon of Third World cosmetic surgery and the ideological narratives about Third World women, which are offered and naturalized by the photograph and the news article’s representation of
Third World cosmetic surgery. Like Kuo, Bañales brings in the global
context of international economic relations to understand the politics
of representation at work in what appears to be a simple photographic
illustration of a “news” feature.
Indeed, many of the essays use the photographs as a point of departure or an illustration for a much broader discussion of the social,
historical, economic, and cultural conditions that produce such representations, thereby emphasizing the embeddedness of the photograph
in a thicker, more complex, and more contradictory world than the
photograph and its embodied ways of seeing leads us to see. In her
essay exploring the issues of economic racism and racialized injury
raised by a lawsuit filed in behalf of Black smokers against the tobacco
companies, Sarah Jain places a cigarette ad in Ebony magazine in the
messy context of the emergence of an African American middle class,
intensifying Civil Rights struggles, the growth of tobacco corporations
and the rise of U.S. consumerism in the post–World War II period, in
order to suggest the complexity of actors and institutions accountable
for the production of “race” and racialized injury. Beyond mere contextualization, the strategy of restoring the photographs to a dynamic
history foregrounds struggle, conflict, and contradiction as the conditions of the photographs’ production and reception and, very importantly, of their meanings and functions within social worlds structured
by racism, sexism, homophobia, and capitalist exploitation. As
Darshan Campos’s essay on the images on the CD album cover of the
Cuban American singer Albita reveals, photographs of popular culture
often play at least two tracks, two trajectories of political meaning and
desire, at once—one of transgression of normative discourses of gender,
race, and sexuality and another of capitalization on such transgressions
and the gendered state racisms that support it. Two tracks symbolize
not so much a Manichean world of absolute divisions and antagonisms as the conditions of contradiction and ambivalence—indeed, the
very conditions of the borderland—that characterize the positions of
the subjects interpellated by these photographs. Similarly, Keta
Miranda’s essay on the album cover of a collection of early 1960s East
Introduction
7
Los Angeles bands, highlights the processes of cultural negotiation of
identities, meanings, and desires engaged in by Chicano/a youth during
a period when the War on Poverty, the war in Vietnam and the Civil
Rights struggles raged, serving to heighten the paradoxical experience
and social contradictions of the American Dream for emerging
Chicano/a subjects. Focusing in particular on the album cover’s photographic depiction of the bands’ screaming girl fans, Miranda attends
to the dynamic process of articulating an emergent identity for
Chicano/a youth prior to the Chicano Power movement, the growth of
possibilities of middle-class citizenship for Mexican Americans in Los
Angeles and “the non-productive and uncontrollable expression of
desires beyond meeting and satisfying needs” that are part of the
politics of the subcultural moment depicted in the photograph.
Another strategy employed by the essays, which works against the
objectifying tendency of photographic images, is the subjectification of
images. This means looking at the meanings images bear for alternative social subjects or, put another way, viewing images as signifying
practices that help to constitute not only dominant but also alternative
forms of subjectification. The “I” voice evident in all of the essays here
is not a matter of private, individual reflection but rather a matter of
social subjectivity, which implies an interested and affective view, as
against the self-evidence and empirical realism that photographs have
long been associated with. J. Kehaulanui Kaunui’s essay opens with a
“scientific” photograph that was part of a Rockefeller-funded ethnological research project on race-mixing in Hawaii. Kaunui’s discussion
dwells on the historical and social conditions of the photograph in
order to unveil the racist project of “remaking” of Hawaiians that the
study in question was an important part of and, further, to show how
the issue of the blood quantum requirement for Hawaiians continues
to shape Hawaiian dispossession in the present moment. Moreover,
she searches the photograph for its evocative meanings for today’s
Hawaiian sovereignty struggles, for clues to what eludes the dominant
modes of identification shaped by this dominant racist history, for alternate ways of understanding what constitutes Hawaiian-ness and its
invoked terms of belonging. In contrast to Kaunui’s essay but very much
in keeping with this subjectifying strategy, Naono Akiko’s essay opens
up with a private family photograph, which records a personal loss,
the death of her grandfather from radiation sickness. As Naono writes
of this loss, however, the haunting absence marked by the photograph
becomes an opening into a different understanding of a too-well
understood public event, the bombing of Hiroshima. Caught between
two imperialist governments and their nationalist state violence,
8
between the roles of “victim” and “victimizer” demarcated by prevailing
political narratives, and trapped in the deathly embrace of either
innocence or guilt, Naono’s figure of absence troubles the familiar
political landscape in which present-day Japanese have learned to
navigate and, in doing so, makes space for other, yet unforeseen, possibilities for political action and political subjectivity to emerge.
Plying the terrain between personal and public fantasies, Luz Calvo
approaches a photograph by Chicana artist Laura Aguilar with a similar affective movement toward open-endedness, in lieu of analytical
closure and political conclusions. Calvo unravels the signifying strands
of the fantasy staged by Aguilar’s photograph not from a disinterested
perspective but rather from a subjective position bound up in the very
same psychic, social constraints that shape and are represented in the
photograph. In this way, Calvo stages the very ambivalent social and
psychic dynamics that images provoke in the subjects they interpellate.
Reading images subjectively means engaging questions of who the photographs are for—what kind of subjects they presume and produce,
how “we,” as viewers, are enticed to see the world, and how the way
we see the world and each other might matter. Photographs stir the
imagination, and beyond any “objective” restoration of the conditions
of their production, the histories out of which they emerge and are
embedded in, they work by evoking memories, speculation, dreams,
and desires on the part of viewers. These subjective aspects of images
perform the affective and ideological work necessary to maintain as
well transform the worlds of social injustice that we live in. In these
essays, besides history, the viewer is also what lies beyond the frame but
nevertheless compels our attention. The authors foreground their own
subjectivity as a practice of women of color criticism, a practice of
situating hegemonic histories and objectified reality in alternate, unrecognized social contexts through subjective means. Speaking as political
and personal subjects at the intersections of racial, gendered, and
sexual oppression and freedom, they foreground their subjectivity as a
critical enactment of difference, making the photographs a presentation
of difference and possibility—a “may-be”—rather than a representation of sameness and reality—an “is.”
These strategies of reading photographs are about looking and
looking again in ways that enable the telling of different stories, the
reviving of histories that are either actively lost or obliterated, and the
making of new histories and new futures. The reconfiguration of dominant ways of looking thus means the creation of new lenses that
mobilize images and make possible impeded fantasies and desires,
Introduction
9
lenses that can also bring into focus alternative images which threaten
to disappear from history even as they offer alternate possibilities of
experience, life, and political action, some lost, some yet to be gained.
All these authors hold out for such possibilities, even if only the possibility of seeing the social injustice and historical wounds that are obliterated from hegemonic sight but that continue to haunt the dominant
visual representations of our real and imagined worlds. Photographs
become a spur to refigure prevailing notions of who or what one is as
a people, a community, a woman of color. As the contributors envisioned for this project, photographs become a tool for interrupting the
conception of women of color identities as “ahistorical, fixed or essential.” They become tools in a continuing struggle.
Most of the essays in this book demonstrate this simple but crucial
premise: images are sites as well as instruments of social struggle. In
the last section, in particular, the authors focus on the importance of
images for creating communities of struggle and shaping the terms of
political participation, solidarity, and liberation. Maylei Blackwell
writes, for example, on the way the figure of la Soldadera was used by
Chicana activists to refigure women’s political agency within the
Chicano movement. Blackwell argues that the visual tropes and icons
deployed in struggle “are not just ‘representations’ of what already
exists within Chicano culture but rather, political and cultural practices which play a constitutive role in the domain of culture.” Chicana
feminist iconography reworked the dominant gendered tropes of
Chicano nationalism as Chicanas negotiated their own political subjectivities and historical agencies and opened up new social spaces and
oppositional publics. Catrióna Rueda Esquibel builds her discussion
of struggle around the legendary figure of the Aztec princess
Ixtacihuátl depicted in a photograph by artist Robert Buitrón. Like
Calvo, Esquibel unpacks the social fantasies that the photograph
ambivalently plays upon. She inquires into the pleasures obtained
from the prevalent images of the Aztec princess circulating in popular
Mexican and Chicano/a cultural environments and demonstrates the
provocative pleasures and challenging counter-fantasies that Buitrón’s
image offers in their stead. In this way, Esquibel highlights the importance of counter-images of Native women for spurring the alternative
imaginations that accompany social struggle.
Michelle Habell-Pallán also takes a female icon of struggle—the protagonist figure of Jim Mendiola’s 1996 independent short film, Pretty
Vacant—as the point of departure for a discussion of Chicana feminist
cultural production. Like the image of female fans in Miranda’s essay,
10
the image opens up a discursive space for Habell-Pallán’s analysis of the
politics of Chicana punk music in East Los Angeles and Hollywood during the 1970s and 1980s. For Habell-Pallán, the press photo from the
film encapsulates and stages the transnational political sensibilities that
shaped Chicana feminist struggles during this period. As she writes,
“The photo functions as a visual allegory for the way Chicana feminists
and artists—as women of color—at the turn of the century, have turned
a critical eye on the public sphere, and in doing so, have envisioned
new subjects and subjectivities, as well as mapped out affiliations with
racialized-as-non-white women within and across national borders.”
Focusing on an image of a woman of color, now placed at the center of
the frame, Habell-Pallán’s essay might itself serve as an allegory for this
book as a whole insofar as the contributors all seek to place what is conventionally beyond the frame—histories, subjectivities, struggles—at
the center of our attention, pleasure, and concern as a way to envision
our worlds differently.
As editorial participants in this project, we hope Beyond the Frame
contributes to new ways of image-making as well as new ways of looking. The essays here show that readers of images can also reframe and
refocus dominant images, through critical analysis, historical research,
counternarratives, countermemories, imagination, and fantasy, and
thereby participate in the photographic process beyond the reproduced photographic image itself. Viewers are enjoined to be active
interpreters and alternative producers of their meaning-making visual
environments. In this way, we hope this project contributes to what we
might call visual modes of resistance, whereby counter-images are
deployed in the furthering of transformative social movements. And
we hope it contributes to new strategies of resistance reading or reading practices that create, support, and expand the social struggles
within which, ultimately, this endeavor is most meaningfully located.
Note
We acknowledge Kianga Ford as well as the editorial collective for their important
work in organizing the conference. Other participants whose essays did not make it
into this volume but whose work and involvement in the project were absolutely
crucial to the project’s realization include: Annie Laurie Anderson, Kale Fajardo,
Noelani Goodyear-Kapoua, Jarita Holbrook, and Deborah Vargas. We also thank
Gina Dent, Jennifer Gonzales, Avery Gordon, Saidiya Hartman, and Deborah
Wright for their helpful and generous advice and mentorship during the conference.
Part 1
Popular Culture and Advertising
1
“The East Side Revue, 40 Hits by East Los Angeles
Most Popular Groups!” The Boys in the Band
and the Girls Who Were Their Fans
Keta Miranda
The early 1960s East Los Angeles music scene—garage bands, rock and
roll shows, car club sponsored dances, cruising down Whittier Blvd.,
Mod style and original dance steps—was a synergetic public space of
cultural hybridity.1 An artifact of the period between 1963 and 1968 is
the recording and album cover of the “East Side Revue: 40 Hits by East
Los Angeles Most Popular Groups!” The two record set album’s first
release was in 1966 and reissued in 1969 to commemorate LA’s East
Side Sound—in clear wax for audiophiles. In each release the album
cover remained constant [see figure 1.1].2 There are twenty photos of
the garage bands that participated in the recording effort; the photographs are publicity shots produced in photography studios. In the
majority of twenty, the band members are professionally positioned for
the group shot. The studio photos of the band members align along the
edges of the album cover create a frame, encasing the album title and
the larger, center picture.3 In this center photo there are women standing, dancing, arms waving in the air, with their mouths wide open—
screaming. These girl fans evoke the “mania” of the early 1960s—the
uncontrollable idolization of stars and fandom gone rampant. In most
accounts of rock and roll, fandom (mania) is isolated from the musicology and from the musician’s personal-career history. Fandom, separated from the musical form and the histories of the performers, stands
outside as an incongruous phenomenon. Yet, here in this photo montage
14
Keta Miranda
Figure 1.1 Front cover of East Side Revue: 40 Hits by East Los Angeles Most Popular
Groups! (specially priced 2 record set). Released through Rampart Records Label,
1969. Used by permission, Hector Gonzalez.
of band members and fans of a local and regional music that made up
the East Side Sound, a different understanding of fandom in relationship to the distinctive Chicano musical style can be decoded. In this
essay, I make a particular kind of turn, a movement that centers the fans
of the East Side Sound, specifically the teenage girls who were the fans
of the boys in the bands. Focusing on the fans will mark a decided shift
from the usual paradigms about rock and roll history and analysis of
local, regional musical style.
The East Side Revue
15
In the exceptional works of Stephen Loza, Barrio Rhythm (1993),
and David Reyes and Tom Waldman, Land of 1000 Dances (1998),
the authors’ primary projects are to situate Chicano music in relation
to mainstream rock and roll as a dominant American musical style.
Each of the social history treatises examines the influence of Chicano
artists and music upon the mainstream (and vice versa). Additionally,
Loza, Reyes, and Waldman critique the recording industries inability
to market the music of Mexican American artists. While such a market critique may bring about an interpretation in which Chicano music
is relegated as a subordinated culture attempting to cross over, the
authors instead register a different paradigm to understand Chicano
music. Through interviews with Chicano musicians and producers, the
music that constituted the East Side Sound reflects their attempt not
only to seek inclusion to the mainstream, but also to transform the
dominant. Thus, the authors recognize culture as a site of counterhegemonic practice. Moreover, the authors suggest a workable understanding of the Chicano musical style as a hybrid form. The hybridity
is of particular importance to defining the distinctive character or style
that produces the Chicano sound of the East Los Angeles rock and roll
bands during this period. However, the photo of the girls on the album
cover offers a different approach to reconstruct the history and interpretation of the local, regional music of the East Side Sound.
Providing a methodology to interpretation of history, Emma Pérez’s
The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (1999) calls
for researchers to examine the interstitial space, or the third space,
which is a location for articulating new identities.4 In her critique of
the processes and methodologies that ignore these areas, Perez conceives of these spaces as emergent points of historical transition. In this
sense, this arena for historical recovery is silent because it has been
silenced becoming an unarticulated space. Utilizing her proposition,
I contend that the centrality of the girls in the photo and their voices,
which are heard in various hit recordings by the bands, are fundamentally constitutive of the sound and scene of the early 1960s
Mexican American youth culture. While the Scream and the bodies in
movement can be read as nonproductive and uncontrollable expression
of desire, this essay examines the Scream and the bodies in movement
in order to reconsider—the spaces of cultural production—where
meaning is made.
An album cover is part of product packaging, thus it works as
advertisement. The cover of an album solicits, beckoning the consumer
to “buy me.” This album cover juxtaposes the bands and their fans in
16
Keta Miranda
a complex interrelation in the production of the East Side Sound.
While an image could produce multiple meanings, the conjunction of
image and text produce and “fix” the meaning.5 The caption, “most
popular bands,” privileges as the preferred meaning the bands over
and above the visual representation of the girls. The alignment of the
professionally produced studio photos of the bands works as a frame
for the album, encircling the girl fans and fixing popularity to the
heteronormative boy–girl relationship. The caption and the visual
representation of the East Side scene connect to an already existing
sign system—the star system. The text signifies the metalanguage of
the 1960s captured through the song, “So you want to be a rock and
roll star.” Using the structure of the meta system of mainstream rock
and roll (and the general star-system produced by the media), this
local Mexican American musical scene signifies a claim to fame and
stardom.6 The caption and photo of the girls connect rock and roll
music-making with popularity and for the boys: inevitable popularity
with girls.
The album cover as advertisement works to set itself apart from all
other recordings; inducing the consumer to register the difference and
therefore to buy it. The cover as advertisement enunciates two conceptions for two different consumers: boys and girls. One way of
examining the consumptive practice would be to read the juxtaposition between the bands and girl fans as masculine or dominant meta
system stardom. The frame of studio photos is a signifier of fame, fun,
participating in making the scene. Making the scene is to live outside
the mundane everyday life of teens. Making music is productive and
not just hanging around like the majority of youth. Through the
involvement of arranging songs, understanding a sound and composing a performance for an audience, making music places a value on
self-expression therefore is a means to defining an individual identity
for the performer.7 The added attraction is getting girls. Since the preferred meaning of the album cover constructs the girls as consumers,
they are restricted to consuming the commodity.
Notwithstanding the dominant meaning of the album cover, that is
to set it off from all other albums, the frame of the bands, additionally,
sets boundaries and distinctions between the fans and the bands. The
frame encloses the girls as an act of containment, controlling these
unruly, vocal, dancing girls. Does the containment also signify competition as to what makes up the East Side Sound? Does the enclosure
reveal a conflicting history about the production of the East Side
Sound?
The East Side Revue
17
A second way of studying the album cover as advertisement is to
examine a different kind of desire that is produced by the location of
the girls at the center of the album. What meta system is generated to
have the girls buy the product? The photos of the bands are small. One
cannot sit and dote on one’s favorite band or favorite band member.
Through the juxtaposition, the work of the girls and their social relation
to the production of “the most popular bands” is revealed. The center
photo changes the relationship for the young women: We are central to
this. Our attendance, our presence makes this scene happen. Fandom is
acknowledged. Generally, musical historiography recognizes fans
through their buying power, or as idolization from afar or as irrelevant to
the creation of the artists. In this instance, the juxtaposition centers the
girls who make the bands popular. As decoders of the advertisement,
the centrality of their fandom is a reassertion of the self as producer. The
hidden social relation of production—the general unacknowledged
fan—is revealed in the montage of photos and caption.
However, there is another production process that remains hidden or
overlooked in the descriptive histories of what created the East Side
Sound. The work of the fans establishes not only the scene but also the
musical style. This hypothesis adds another element to the cultural
economy of fandom. While the fans are essential to the East Side Mod
scene through their bodies, their voices—the noise and the screams—are
constitutive of the East Side Sound. Their screams, their voices make the
music categorized as the East Side Sound. Primary evidence of my contention is provided by an interview with Eddy Davis who produced
some of the best recordings among the Mexican American musicians
during the 1960s. In an interview conducted by Lee Joseph in October
of 1992 with the assistance of Carmen Hillebrew for the liner notes for
the CD compilation, The East Side Sound, Eddy Davis describes his role
in producing the recordings and consequently the development of the
Chicano Sound. Describing how he became familiar with local Chicano
rock bands, Davis inadvertently discusses the participation of the girl
fans in the recording of “Farmer John.” A hit for the Premiers, this 1964
song rose to number nineteen on the Billboard chart, one of the highest
showings by a Chicano band of that time. Working with Billy Cardenas,
the manager of several East Side predominantly Mexican American
bands, Davis describes his relation to the Premiers:
Anyway, I broke down one night and let The Romancers on the show
and I was impressed with the feeling they had in their music. That was
my first experience with a Mexican-American group playing Motown
18
Keta Miranda
and R&B. So then we tried another Mexican-American band of Billy’s,
the Premiers. In a casual conversation I happened to mention to Billy
about the song, “Farmer John” by Don and Dewey. Two weeks later
Billy calls me to tell me he wants me to hear something. I went over and
he had the Premiers play “Farmer John.” I told him that I wanted to
record it and we did.
Recounting the production problems, as well as the problem with the
band, Davis goes on:
The Premiers were the greatest groove band in the world. All their music
they played with a groove, but they couldn’t sing for shit! The vocal on
the record was so bad, I just didn’t know what to do. When I recorded
my Rainbow album I used Wally Heider, who’s now a famous technician. At that time he had just got his first remote 8-track and he did my
first album “live” from the Rainbow Gardens in Pomona. I was interested in live sounds, trying to develop that, so I suggested that we record
“Farmer John” live. We got a crowd and we took them over to the studio and we just overdubbed the music with a party going on. That’s how
that happened . . .
“. . . It’s a very groovy single and we made it live. All those voices
screaming, nobody had ever done that. They were a girls’ car club called
the Chevelles that used to follow the Premiers. They were cholitas. They
would scream and holler for the Premiers.” [My emphasis]
Through this haphazard refinement of the product, through this winding tale Davis mentions one of the principle characteristics of the East
Side Sound—the inclusion of the audience, girls!, in the recording. Davis
further explains his use of the claim “Recorded live” was a way to publicize the dance clubs he was promoting. It also made the band’s music
available to the consumer. In Davis’s scheme the youth attendance at the
clubs and the possibility of participating in a recording “caused excitement. It seemed to work . . . They were coming just like that.”
Through this ingenuous production, the hidden social relations
between stars and fans reveal not only the consumptive practices, but
also the fans who created the rock and roll phenomena of Chicano
bands and the East Side Sound during the 1960s. The relocation of
fans in the cultural production of the East Side music differentiates the
product from all other garage band recordings. While the music history of these proto-punk rockers feature the artists and their music,
the sound of the 1960s for Mexican American youth in Los Angeles
embodies the girl fans through the noise that they make: the screams.
The East Side Revue
19
Rock music is indebted to its roots from African American traditions of gospel and blues. In the liner notes for the CD compilation,
The Grandson of Frat Rock, Volume 3, Richard Henderson notes that
Ray Charles’s 1959 musical arrangement of “What’d I say” formulated
a staple of pop music:
Little remains to be said about Ray Charles, as he has become the
revered institution he always deserved to be. However, “What’d I Say,”
a Jerry Wexler production dating from July 1959, contains some neat
innovation that helped secure its success, and that have long been
regarded as part of the furniture in the pop market place. I’m speaking
of the infectious call and response vocals exchanged between Ray and
his backup singers, The Raeletts, which were common to inner-city
gospel churches, but were very new to the AM radio of the day. (Liner
notes, 1991, Rhino Records)
Additionally, at the very end of the recording, the voices of the studio
band and Raeletts emerge as Charles finishes the song abruptly. The
voices of protest are for Charles to continue as well as expressions of
a great session. The affection of the audience, in this instance the
singers and the musicians in this call and response relationship, produce a “live” quality. The singer in this relationship “belongs” to the
audience who wish Charles not to stop, but to keep going.
The call and response that produces a performer “belonging” to the
audience occurs in Davis’s “recorded live” from the Rainbow Room,
accentuating the relation between fans and bands in the Premier’s
1964 national hit. The utilization of the audience influenced a later
national hit by Cannibal and the Headhunters, “Land of 1000
Dances” in 1965. Like the Premiers’s cover recording, the song was
first recorded by Rythm and Blues artist, Chris Kenner (I Like It Like
That). The song became a staple in the repertoire by the East Los
Angeles singing group. Most interviews contend that Garcia (the
Cannibal and lead singer of the Headhunters) brought in the unforgettable, and contagious “Na, Na, Na, Na, Na, Na” refrain because
he forgot the words to the music. Nonetheless, what is rarely celebrated, is the “live” audience that participates in the recording. Reyes
and Waldman corroborate the following:
Everybody, it seems, has a story to tell about the recording of “Land of
1000 Dances.” The most accurate accounts are probably those of
Frankie Garcia, Billy Cardenas, and Eddie Davis . . . As with many
songs produced by Davis and Cardenas, this one was recorded under
20
Keta Miranda
simulated live conditions. The team would typically import both friends
and strangers into the studio to whoop, holler, and shout encouragement,
providing the background noise that takes place at a concert. The idea
was to recreate the excitement of an East LA show without any attendant risks of taping an actual performance, such as an audience that is
too boisterous to allow for the musicians to be properly heard. (Reyes
and Waldman, 71)
Unlike the Premiers recording on a three track tape, the audience
background is muffled until the moments in which the call and
response of the singer and audience, “Na, Na, Na . . .” commences
one quarter through the set. The two songs went national, thus the
location of the fans, particularly the girl fans who make the most
raucous noise is located in the production. Thus, Davis’s idea of “live”
is one of the most singular qualities of the East Side Sound that the rest
of America heard.8 Examining “the East Side Sound” through the
voices of the girl fans provides a way to examine the Mod scene
among Mexican American youth during that decade.
While the album cover as advertisement reveals a set of production
relations, the photo montage also offers an entry to examine the social
context of the musical phenomenon. It is to consider the wider meaning of the album cover as emergent points of historical transition. In
this instance, the text of the album cover must relate to the broader
sociopolitical relationships in which both fans and bands are embedded. Thus, the body language of the girls and their scream becomes a
key site for examining the articulation of identity in the 1960s.
What is of particular interest to me is that the screaming, in chaotic
fandom, is not for the Beatles—a band that was successfully marketed
by the record companies. Nor are these young women screaming for
Elvis who is not only successfully marketed but given the aspect of
“star-dom” transcends the local community to acquire national fame.
Instead, these girls are screaming for the boy who lives down the
street. A boy whom the girls go to school with. A boy who is their best
friend’s brother or cousin. This local fame presents some interesting
ideas to consider. Fame in its U.S. sense is attached to fortune and
glamor. Fame is a representative of the North American Horatio
Alger’s success story: every poor boy has the opportunity to fame and
fortune. What does local fame then signify?
Screaming out the band member’s name—Willie! Ray! Eddie!—
registers a close identity with the performer. The performer is a “star”
who is not nationally marketed and therefore far from them, but
The East Side Revue
21
rather for a Chicano youth who is close by. Local fame expresses the
shared status between the local star and the local fan. During the
period between 1963 and 1968, when the first wave of East Los
Angeles Rock and Roll revues occurred, the dominant social paradigm
of social injustice was framed in terms of Black and White. The racial
and social issues framed between these two terms then devalues the
experience of the Mexican American youth and empties occurrences in
which identity—racial, ethnic, or national—is articulated. (Thus, even
though the state attempts to prescribe identity and race, it can fail at
the local level.)
Since the young men are local (immediate), community (Mexican
American) boys, the screaming (body) registers the space, an interstice,
within the state-regulated discourse about ethnicity and race, constraining the ways that individuals and groups can articulate identity.
At the time, census forms did not include the term “Mexican
American” as a way to claim ethnic-national identity. Thus, many
Chicanos marked the box—Caucasian. Yet, their everyday lives were
anything but the experience of White-ness. Dominant discourse framed
racial/ethnic identity through social problems of poverty, racism,
employment, and education, bringing forth a mixed and complicated
relation to national identity.9 Screaming not for Elvis but for a young
man who could be their neighbor, configures the paradoxical experience about the myth of the American Dream. The scream can then be
understood as articulated identity during a period when there is a War
on Poverty, a war in Vietnam, and warring sides in the burgeoning Civil
Rights movements and the emergent youth and student movements.
The body of the fans becomes a preeminent (consummate?) concern. The screaming bodies articulate the oneness of their local experience with the growing population of Mexican Americans in Los
Angeles. The body in this sense speaks when subjective emotion is
proscribed, when dominant discourse has structured other terms for
naming identity. The screaming bodies, hundreds of Mexican American
girls gathered in the auditoriums of high schools and union halls, converge into a singleness of uproarious clamor. Hundreds of bodies become
the social body.
The screaming bodies are juxtaposed to the fluency of style that the
youth participated in. Most of the boys in the bands wore the dress of
the British Mods and the fans appropriated the style. This reworked
Chicana/o aesthetic style may not be so unusual in most of our minds,
since the early 1960s media was saturated with the Mandarin-collared
suit coats, tight fitting trousers and the longer hair for boys, as well as
22
Keta Miranda
the Mary Quant makeup of thick black eyeliner, straightened hair,
long straightened bangs, of precision-asymmetrical haircuts, and the
Twiggy style for girls. Such mediated style was taken up by the majority
of youth. The image was everywhere.
One can argue that the Mod style is disguised orientalism.
Orientalism, as described by Edward Said (1978: 12), is a “will or intention to understand, in some cases to control, manipulate, and even
incorporate, what is a manifestly different (or alternative and novel)
world.” In this instance it is not the stereotypical “mysterious Orient”
of danger, darkness, and fear, but the Orient of demeanor, gentility, and
precision that is appropriated. The style conflicts with the raucous
mood of rock and roll. (Could this be an instance of packaging rock and
roll to control the stormy mood and turbulent bodies of youth?) Yet, the
style cannot contain the music or the bodies or maintain the boundaries
of nation-states. The Mod scene arrives along a convoluted course from
England, from its eastern colonies back to a failing imperialist Britain to
the United States. Similarly, the music was Rhythm and Blues, moving
across the Atlantic and returning to the United States. with a particularly Mod influence on the sound.10 The musical travel—the course of
the sound from African American Rhythm and Blues to Britain back to
the United States—registers the distinction of between-ness, of fissure,
within the American social paradigm of Black/White relations.
The Mod style as it operated for Chicano youth in Los Angeles offers
a possible interpretation of oppositional politics where youth grasp the
style to signify opposition to the state project of patriotism and
Americanism. The state’s discourse of integration and economic mobility
requires assimilation—loss and erasure of culture and history. The style
and music were important markers of identity for the Chicano youth of
Los Angeles in the early 1960s. The American sound of Surfer music was
replaced by the British beat. It offered an oppositional style to a grouping that was outside of the surfers’ socioeconomic background.11
Notably, the style and music taken up by Chicano youth in Los
Angeles, the Mod scene, seem to register a rejection of Americanism as
typified by Hollywood produced surfer. However, it is not a rejection
of the surf sound (like that of Dick Dale and the Deltones et al.). The
rejection was more about the kind of music produced by the taming of
the Beach Boys and definitely the surfer sound of the “beach” movies
featuring Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello. These portrayals of
youthful frolicking produced the suburban sound subduing youth sexuality and adventure.12 The bands and youth who took up the Mod
The East Side Revue
23
dress would lead one to conclude that it was an oppositional style, that
is, oppositional to the dominant White middle class, U.S. culture.
The Mod style as it operated for Chicano youth in Los Angeles
offers a more complex approach than orientalism. While one possible
interpretation can be seen as oppositional politics—to oppose the state
projects of patriotism and Americanism, a hegemonic national identity—
there is another form of “assimilation” occurring. The Mod style is at
the same time a desire, a wish to enter the middle class. The period
between 1963 and 1968 was one in which economic mobility reached
greater numbers and in particular through economic programs and
affirmative action, produces economic mobility that performs a class
assimilation that is different from the function of ethnic/racial/nationalist
assimilation.
Thus, to look at the girl-fans, to investigate their expressions and
modes of behavior, their style, introduces a different path of class
mobility. It marks the psychological preparation for middle-class citizenship for Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. The music scene is the
interstitial space in which Mexican American youth were reconstructing their racial-ethnic and class identities in the period just prior to the
Chicano Power movement. The cultural politics of that moment,
depicted in the moving, dancing bodies and the scream, is generally
excluded as a nonpolitical digression. This neglected and excluded history, particularly the practices of the girls, offers a way to examine the
political, economic, and racial factors at play at the moment of producing a rising middle class.
Hence, I note one other form of antithesis at work during the early
1960s. The Mod style was also a rejection of the cholo image and the
cholo style. Cholo was the term used to identify what we now call
gangbangers. The cholo image—Pendelton shirt and bell-bottomed
khakis or bell-bottomed jeans—dominated the youth style in the late
1950s and early 1960s in Los Angeles among Mexican American
youth. The move by youth to take up the Mod style, marks a particular turning point for identity as a minority in the United States. The
postwar economy that hit the United States finally came to the barrio
of Los Angeles in the mid-1960s. But it was a postwar boon that was
bolstered by state intervention with programs like the War on Poverty.
It was a moment when economic mobility was a real possibility for a
community that had been relegated to the margins of subsistence for
generations. It was a moment in which a new social class outlook and
sensibility could be formed given the possibility of mobility.
24
Keta Miranda
Turning away from the cholo style, the patois, the language, and
English-Spanish code switching suggests the trend toward assimilation
by the Mexican American youth. However, I believe that it was not
necessarily an assimilative intention. Grasping the British Mod subcultural style was a device for marking difference arising from its
resistance meanings in Britain.13 Therefore, it maintains some of its
nonconformist character among the Chicano youth in the United
States. Not Black and not White, not cholo and not surfer, the Mod
style presented a hybrid cultural form for Angeleno youth who eclectically brought together musical forms and cultural style to register
difference in a period where ethnic/racial and social identity are constrained. It was a transitional moment. It marked not only opposition
to the dominant culture but also registered difference from the former
class identity to an emerging class identity.
This liminal identity, not a cholo, is why I focus on the young
women who carved out a social space for their social expectations.
One of the features of the Mod sound was its celebration of self. In this
manner the critics of music register the hedonism of youth subcultural
style. Yet, I think that for the period between 1963 and 1968, there is
another reasoning emerging, particularly for the girls. The sound of
the 1950s could be generally characterized by the notions of unrequited love, of personal investment to tragic love, and of the completed self in love relations. While the Mod/Mersey Beat and Soul/R
and B music did repeat and reproduce these notions, there were at the
same time the notions of freedom and even chaos and uncontrollability. These sounds and words offered enjoyment and pleasure at a point
when a consumer culture extensively diffuses throughout society. The
scene, in combination with the postwar economy, offered new consumptive practices formerly unavailable to a large section of the
Mexican American community. And, at the same time, the celebration
of self, male or female, boy or girl, offered distinct new concepts of self
for the young women. One’s identity did not have to be locked/
contained in the dynamic of the love duo.
Choosing a different style indicates the politics of representation.
As Donald Lowe has noted, the peak stage of the perceptual revolution happens simultaneously with the postwar growth of capitalism
with the expanding and accelerating rate of capitalist production and
consumption in the boom economy.14 Representation becomes the site
of struggle to express interests, of meeting and satisfying social
needs—beyond material needs and wants. The Mod style, while it may
be marked as extraneous need, signifies social aspiration. Additionally,
The East Side Revue
25
the consumptive practice is placed upon the body, over the body. It is
important to register the differences between body practices and style
as representation. Style as a representational practice differs from
body practices. The bodies of the Mexican American youth are racialized in social practices of exclusion and discrimination in higher rates
of unemployment, lower educational attainment, segregated residence
and high rates of police brutality. Clothing the body enters the realm
of symbolization, like the written sign. Representation symbolizes in
order to depict or portray a reconstructed identity.
“Not a cholo,” marks the socialization process in which the young
women as fully conscious agents of change demand that their
boyfriends and girlfriends change their fashion style and socially refigure themselves in a society that is able to incorporate a large grouping
into its middle class.15 The shift in style registers the fact that a sizable
number of Mexican Americans were becoming economically mobile.
The socialization process of getting ready for the social mobility
needed a psychological factor, to incorporate the middle-class concepts of propriety and behavior (the bourgeois-ification of the lower
income working class to a middle-class mind-set).
I am aware that this formulation about the role of young women as
agents of socialization—the woman behind the man—is problematic.
The social roles for women in this early 1960s period were expanding,
particularly as more women entered the employment field outside the
home. Work outside the home was still conceptualized as work supplemental to the male head of household income, or “pin-money.”
This notion of work therefore constructs an identity of complementarity for young Chicanas. In fact, this way of thinking was considered
progressive at the time. With social roles defined as, and limited to,
work in the home, the drive toward middle-class norms can be viewed
as an important role that young Mexican American women helped to
accomplish. While it seems as if there is a lack of agency, or returning
to a subordinate role, the opposite may be considered. The role of wife
and future mother under a new set of economic (social production)
relations prepared the way for the social mobility that was now possible for a large number of Mexican Americans. In this way, the young
women participate in the psychological and ideological shifts.
During the early 1960s, Klein categorized Chicano youth as either
cholos or squares.16 While the typology is problematic, that is, there is
a greater variety of youth between the categories, nonetheless, one can
utilize Klein’s categories to investigate the subcultural notions that
did operate in such dichotomies. The Mod style was a space to act out
26
Keta Miranda
hipness. Mod style was an exaggeration of neatness; the dress was
conventional yet exaggerated to undermine conventions. As Dick
Hebdige (1979) has noted about the Mod style, “it undermined the
meaning of conservative dress through a style that pushed neatness to
the point of absurdity.” Predominantly a working-class youth culture
in postwar England, many Mods had jobs “which made fairly stringent demands on their appearance, dress and ‘general demeanor’ ”
enabling them “to negotiate smoothly between school, work and
leisure.” The style disrupted the orderly conventions of clothing,
underneath was a “ ‘secret identity’ constructed here beyond the limited experiential scope of the bosses and teachers, [it] was an emotional affinity with black people.” The affinity to the “Black Man”
was a form of subversion for the Mods: to bend the rules to suit his
own purposes, elaborate different codes, and use language skills to
conceal as well as invert the “straight” worlds values, norms, and conventions (52–54).
Attention to the latest dance, the latest song, the latest fad marks
the social ability to become consumers of superfluous commodities. At
the same time, by consuming certain cultural goods, they in turn resisted certain cultural and ethnic stereotypes. These are practices located
in the social relations of consumption. Attention to the latest craze, the
subcultural style allows for a greater number of youth to become not
only consumers of marketable commodities but also makers of purposeful choices.17 Thus, resistant practices may be understood as
blocks and obstacles to racial or ethnic assimilation, not necessarily
oppositional to economic assimilation.
Situated in this Mod scene are music, style, and dance. Dance in
particular is an aspect of culture that is usually considered nonproductive and therefore generally not critically studied in social science
research. Dance is usually researched as either high art or folk art.
Focusing on dance yet again offers an examination of emergence. The
body becomes a critical element to understand the structures of feeling
operating in the barrios of Los Angeles. Again, dance and the body are
the other forms of communicating the incommunicable. For me, the
dance also symbolizes the ability to articulate one’s identity in a society that racializes bodies.
In The Body in Late Capitalism, Donald Lowe argues that nonexchangist social and cultural values are destabilized under the capitalist endeavor to constantly create new markets for consumption.
While including the role of mass media that creates new desires for
consumption, he argues that these elements transformed the past
The East Side Revue
27
established patterns of meeting and satisfying human needs. Marking
the 1950s as the point of no return, he argues that the consumption
of lifestyle radically refigures individual subjects and how they
respond to state capitalism. In many ways, I do agree with his overall
hypothesis. However, the study of the music scene in Los Angeles
among Mexican American youth would delineate the areas of subjects as citizens (i.e., rights), subjects as agents of choice (consumers),
and change (rights and social agency), and bodies (i.e., subject to
structures, economic, state, and to ideological) that are acted upon by
the material conditions of living and the state. A study of the subcultural style of the East L.A. Mod scene accounts for the challenge to
racist and stereotypical representations because of the wide-range of
signifiers that are not only marketed but can also be stolen from the
vast array of images and messages. The musical scene includes the
bodies of youth in dance or the screaming body offering a different
range of signification, somewhere outside of base, exchange value
and consumption. The Scream and the dance of this period could be
seen as if it is the nonproductive and uncontrollable expression of
desires beyond meeting and satisfying needs. However, the Scream
and dance can also be considered the interstitial space where meaning
can be interpreted.
Notes
1. This essay sketches out a future research project about the East Los Angeles
Mod scene. In a book project tentatively titled, The Boys in the Band and the
Girls who were their Fans, I will examine the subcultural style in order to locate
a site of transitional identity politics during the years between 1963 and 1968.
The shift from the bands to the fans focuses on the agency of the women who
carved out space for a social identity. By focusing on the social milieu, investigating the lives of the youth in their own lived contexts, examining a wide range
of consumptive practices, I hope to characterize the youth subculture and determine the historical location of racial/ethnic, class, gender, and sexual identity.
By shifting emphasis to the fans, to the local community, to the relations
between the fans and the band, I examine consumptive practices during postwar capitalist development. What’s more, the local context becomes the salient
feature to situate identity, race, class, gender, and sexual identity, in the context
of state institutional projects of assimilation, the inclusionist policies that
attempt to erase difference in the name of liberalist national identity. Thus,
I attempt to look at those spaces where culture is negotiated, where identity is
created when there is pressure to erase the local and particular locations of
identity production.
28
Keta Miranda
2. The album cover has been reproduced in the 1999 four volume CD collection,
The East Side Sound (Rampart; distributed by American Pie as LP 3303; 1966
(1969)). All of the covers for this collection reconstitute the format of the earlier record albums, however differences are the center photo of fans who are
boys and girls or as in volume four the producers of the rock and roll shows
are centered. The third volume CD cover is the picture of the girls, however
photos formatted along the album cover are different band members as well
as the labels of the local recording companies that distributed the records of
the local bands that constituted the East Side Sound.
3. The one photo of The Sisters, a local singing group who sang for various
bands, is pictured just under the banner that announces the album. The Sisters
have been interviewed by Stephen Loza, Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American
Music in Los Angeles (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), and by
David Reyes and Tom Waldman, Land of 1000 Dances: Chicano Rock ‘n’
Roll from Southern California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1998).
4. See Emma Pérez, The Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).
5. See Roland Barthes, “Rhetoric of the Image” in Image, Music, Text (essays
selected and translated by Stephen Heath NY: Hill and Wang, 1988 (1994)).
6. The star system is a highly manufactured relation between the consumer and
artist produced by the media. The system depends on the presentation of
images from commercial pop culture. Fantasy in this relation places the fan in
a subordinate role, in awe of the male performer. See Angela McRobbie,
“Girls and Subcultures” in Feminism and Youth Culture: From Jackie to Just
Seventeen (Boston, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989).
7. See Simon Frith, “The Cultural Study of Popular Music” in Cultural Studies,
edited by Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treicher, 1992 (New
York: Routledge, 1992: 174) who summarizes the ethnographies of British
rock artists by Sarah Cohen, “Society and Culture in the Making of Rock
Music in Liverpool” (Unpublished Ph.D. Thesis. Oxford University, 1987),
and Ruth Finnegan, Hidden Musicians (Cambridge University Press, 1989).
8. While live albums are now part of the mainstay of top rock bands, the history
of live recordings begin in 1963 with James Brown’s Live at the Apollo, Vol. 1
[King K826] followed by the Animal’s 1965, On Tour. Live albums do not take
up the repertoire until 1970, when technological innovations allow the recording of live performances—the interaction between audience and performer.
9. See Thomas Holt, The Problem of Race in the Twenty-First Century
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), on race making at the
everyday level of peoples lives that links national and local.
10. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), who discusses the hybridity of music and the ineffaceable essential meaning of Black music.
11. Surf music particularly the sound was rehabilitated for the Beach movies,
arises from the concern of White middle-class parents who did not want their
children patronizing Black musicians. The Beach movies and subsequent
musical genre were intended to keep their children away from Black soul
The East Side Revue
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
29
music—the transgressive energy of funk. It was a cultural intervention in
the lives of White youth by their parents (i.e., the establishment to tame the
flaunting bodies of delinquent “animalism”). See Susan Douglas, Where the
Girls Are: Growing Up Female with the Mass Media (New York: Times
Books; Random House, 1994 (1995)).
Note also the “whitening” of Italian American youth that erases ethnicity
in Southern California. As a cultural space of homogenization, Hollywood
de-ethnicizes the East Coast Italian American experience of ethnic and urban
identity. Therefore, Mexican American style signals resistance to assimilation
to dominant culture not to class mobility.
Dick Hebdige explains style as a signifier rather than distinct cultural expressions. Since style takes place in a complex relation to social existence of its
followers, the objective of style is to be out of step with mainstream dominant
culture in Subculture: The Meaning of Style (New York: Routledge, 1970).
Donald Lowe, The Body in Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1995: 12), discusses the perceptual revolution that began in 1905–1915
and fully developed in the second half of this century. New epistemes emerged
where representations of identity and difference were ordered in spatial terms.
The point here is that capitalism is in its productive capacity, its drive for
markets and profit brings about a larger base of people into social production.
However, the term “society” may be questionable because it connotes civil
society and forms of law and justice. “Society” then may not be the term to
use. Society is attempting to resolve issues of civil liberties and human rights—
through the struggles of the Civil Rights organizations—at a time in which
capitalist growth is changing society in a postwar economy.
Malcolm W. Klein presents the subcategories found among Mexican
American youth in Street Gangs and Street Workers (Englewood Cliffs, NJ:
Prentice-Hall, 1971).
I engage an idea by Nancy Chen, Breathing Spaces: Qigong, Psychiatry, and
Healing in China (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), who notes
that the rituals of the state, the statist body or body politic, acts upon and
transforms the body. Her example provides an examination of the Chinese
state that intervenes in the production and development of commodities
enabling consumption. As a result, there is the growth and expansion of
student demonstrations and movements for democracy. Individual bodies or
the social body flows into the social economy. Thus, state policies and projects
transforming consumptive practices can enact much different responses to the
intents of the state.
2
The Commoditization of Hybridity
in the 1990s U.S. Fashion Advertising:
Who Is cK one?1
Laura J. Kuo
. . . an important caveat follows for postcolonial practices, namely the risk that hybridity
might be re-colonised by the apparatus of power as either compensation for our losses,
or as the velvet glove of enjoyment that goes hand in hand with the iron fist of exclusion.
––Kobena Mercer
How does a concept like hybridity travel within different economies—
between the academy, activist arenas, and the media, for example—and
what forms does it take on within these smart mutations? Is the adoption
of a complex concept like hybridity by the media the simple appropriation of culture by capital? The usages, travels, and permutations of
hybridity are more complex and elaborate than a blanket confiscation
of its political value. After all, capital is culture (among other things)
and hybridity is another sign within postmodern commodity systems.
By engaging the structure of these systems we can begin to identify the
ways in which hybridity operates within—and in the service of—the dominant logic of postmodern capitalist neoliberalism, and its massive
contradictions. In this essay I investigate hybridity as a site of possible transgressions of fixed identities, and as a potentially productive
space that has been recolonized by market multiculturalism—a space that
views everyone as mixed and thus elides structural differences and
persistent hierarchies of race, class, gender, and sexuality.
32
Laura J. Kuo
Specifically within the context of advertising, hybridity becomes, at
one level, a strategy that stabilizes discursive power relations within
transnational capital. For example, there are complex relations
between multinational corporations in the United States and U.S./
Third World and gendered immigrant labor practices on the one hand,
and the co-optation of political coalitional work on the other. At
another level, images of hybridity in advertising generate value in a
global world where these commodities circulate. Certainly, a racialized economic hegemony is stabilized through appropriations of racial
diversity discourses within market multiculturalism. Yet it is too easy
to declare that global capital exploits the labor of women of color in
the Third World and in the United States, that advertising hides this
exploitative relationship, and that the images therefore should be criticized and dismissed. Instead, I am interested in the way in which this
practice of “hiding” constitutes a necessary vector of postmodern difference that enables the dominant logic of late capitalism, which in
turn depends upon exploitation, appropriation, and difference.
Advertising hybridity becomes complicitous with the act of hiding, yet
at the same time images of hybridity open up new communities of possibilities for people who take up the ads within their specifics of home
and place, looking toward new forms of identifications and affective
communities within capitalism’s cultural logic.
The observations in this essay are based on the principal photograph of the cK one advertising campaign, which has been displayed
prolifically on billboards and in magazines. This photo (see figure 2.1),
which served as the prototype on which other early cK one ads were
based, is called “Jenny, Kate & Company” in the Calvin Klein
Cosmetics press packet. Using this ad as a sort of case study, I investigate how images of hybridity and multiculturalism in advertising serve
to conflate race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and culture
within a totalizing logic of neoliberalism.2 I call the discursive practice
of homogenizing race, class, nation, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and
culture—and the elision of the specificities of their individual locations
and their intersections—commoditized hybridity. Commoditized
hybridity is a manifestation of a particular practice of the relentless
marketing of race. It is informed by processes of consumption of race
within postmodern capitalism. Commoditized hybridity also can be
represented under the guise of “multiculturalism.”3
The staging of hybridity in fashion culture is inextricably bound up
with the heterogeneity and plurality that are features of identity and
culture—both past and present—in the United States. My specific
33
Figure 2.1 “Jenny, Kate, and Company,” prototype for the cK one: portraits of a
generation advertising campaign, released in September 1994.
interest concerning the performance of commoditized hybridity in
popular culture foregrounds the treatment of U.S./Third World racialized, gendered, and cultural hybridity in the staging of hybridized
racial relations, a phenomenon that is well-illustrated in the photographs that comprise early cK one advertisements.
Calvin Klein fragrances are distributed throughout the world via a
network of affiliated and nonaffiliated distributors. When cK one was
released in September 1994, CK fragrances—Obsession, Obsession
for men, Eternity, Eternity for men, Escape, Escape for men, cK one,
and cK be—dominated the domestic and international marketplace
with 1994 world sales in the range of $500 million.4 The cK one line
of perfumes/colognes entered the market following Obsession ’85,
Eternity ’88 and Escape ’91.5 The photographic images promoting cK
one, entitled “portraits of a generation,” were widespread, appearing
on billboards and television coast to coast and inhabiting the pages of
magazines and newspapers nationally and internationally.6 A series of
black and white cK one photo of the same nature appeared steadily
until late 1998, each image presenting a different arrangement of men
and women lined up side by side, spanning two and sometimes three
or four full magazine pages.7
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Laura J. Kuo
Although my analysis here focuses on cK one, there was a proliferation in the early to mid-1990s of similar marketing campaigns, which
reached their zenith in 1995–1996 with hybridized imagery permeating
the pages of fashion magazines and playing a cardinal role in contemporary mainstream fashion culture itself. The shifting roles race
occupies as both resource and foil in the United States are illuminated
when these cultural texts are situated within larger sociohistorical and
political contexts in late-twentieth-century America. Issues of diaspora
and citizenship, and belonging and displacement, that are evoked
through images like those found in Calvin Klein advertisements are
utterly familiar; yet they are also strangely unsettling—why hybridity,
why now?8
Does the image of multicultural difference as represented in the ad
campaign’s prototype (and its offshoots) valorize a particular state of
cultural hybridity? Or does this instance of racially hybrid fashion
photography merely masquerade as a homage to race, or as magnanimity to racial difference? Despite the complexity and allure of its
exhibition, is this image merely the utilization of race as code to turn
a dollar? Does this image represent anything more than the panning,
homogenizing, and flattening of racial vicissitudes—and hybridized
relations, experiences, and identities—in contemporary U.S. culture?
Do Calvin Klein’s “Jenny, Kate & Company” ads subvert the binary
racial formations that deny notions of hybridity being mapped by
contemporary activists and cultural theorists? In staging the array of
bodies that constitute the nation of hybrids, does Calvin Klein create
an ideological space of hybridity? Is cK one a concession to the force
of hybridity in culture? Is this progress? Or is this advertisement an
example of what Kobena Mercer warns us against, specifically, a
recolonization of hybridity? In this case, are the answers to these
questions mutually exclusive, or can Calvin Klein intend all of these
readings at once—that is, simultaneous progress and recolonization?
I am interested in possible interpretations and receptions of this
photograph, and more importantly the ad campaign it represents, in
relation to the construction of hybridity as a trend in fashion culture.
I also want to consider the ramifications of this enactment with regard
to the social circumstances of hybridity as it concerns women of color
identity within a diasporic transnational U.S. context. This analysis
must be situated within the context of the explicit intentions, objectives, and attitudes of the Calvin Klein Cosmetic Company as articulated in their press kit, which conveys to the consumer extensive data,
facts, and figures. The kit includes everything from ad themes (both
35
photographic and televisual), brand themes, quotes from Klein himself, and the company’s political platform, to a priceless “mission
statement,” all of which beg analysis. Following are the texts of the
cK one product advertisement and mission statement, respectively:
cK one Fragrance—Product Advertisement
If you know who you are. If you’ll try anything once. You won’t take no
for an answer. If you live your own life. If you choose love over stability. If you like to share. If you don’t try to be something you’re not. If
you think conformity is boring. If you’re a man or a woman.
cK one Fragrance—Mission Statement
We live in a time of enormous change and opportunity. Attitudes and
values are shifting, rules are changing. There is an openness to new ideas
that hasn’t been seen for decades. A new perspective that has permeated
everything from fashion to politics to beauty.
As walls come down and boundaries are challenged, the world is getting smaller. People are liberating themselves from restrictions and limitations. Lines between race, sex and age are diminishing. People are
focusing on exposing similarities, not disguising differences.
From this fluidity, a whole new vision of style has emerged. Glamour
has a different meaning. There is no longer a need to enhance one’s gender or conform to a type. Now we are exploring our individuality.
Products that put people into specific categories do not make sense anymore. It’s all about being real.
We wanted to focus on the intimacy real individuals and true partners
experience. People who are so secure that they can share anything. It is a
very natural, almost primal state of mind. One that is extremely sexual.
It’s not about unisex or androgyny or anything else that neutralizes
you as a man or as a woman. It’s honest. It’s open. It’s about being one
with yourself and everyone else.
cK one Fragrance celebrates the individual. It speaks to a diverse group
who identify with this attitude. It is as sexy as the truth. And ultimately, it
aims to do what no Fragrance has done before . . . make you free. (Calvin
Klein Cosmetics Corporation)
This promotional copy is saturated with postmodern liberalism, with a
distinct postmodern focus on alterity, aesthetics, and capitalist individualism as access to freedom. With one bottle of fragrance, the consumer
is transformed into a postmodern liberal humanist, existing in eternal hipness, eminently multicultural and one with humankind. If the revolution
will not be televised, perhaps it has been bottled; cK one will “make you
free.” Calvin Klein’s public relations literature puts forth notions of difference and oneness; it implies that no work needs to be done to create
36
Laura J. Kuo
new relationships, to undo social injustices, to redress inequalities, or to
end exploitation. Instead, it promotes change on the level of the individual. Success and failure are attributed to individuals—to their
actions, or to their failure to act (or to wear fragrance). The construction of alliance in cK one is apolitical. Like the photos that comprised its
early advertisements, the cK one rhetoric both commits and instigates
an apolitical embrace of heterogeneity that stands in for the necessary
political work—at the level of coalition and solidarity—that brings
about social change. In cK one ads, racism is a thing of the past; it is
acknowledged precisely in the past. The embrace of multicultural, gendered, ethnic, and sexual diversity in cK one implies—at least visually—
that social equality has been achieved. The “we” invoked through
cK one is not racist; for this “we” finds racial difference exceedingly
hip—so hip, in fact, that it becomes a commodity.
Quintessentially postmodern—where fragmentation and disunity
are one—the hybrid/multicultural cK one ad campaign adopts postmodern platforms of identity formation in staging photographic
images of racial difference, gender ambiguity, and sexual intimation,
while actually collapsing these categories of differentiation. Calvin
Klein’s dissemination of these hybridized images is about surfaces,
rather than the content of politics. Yet it is precisely the styles and
fashion sensibilities distinctive to a number of specific political contexts
(feminisms, queer/of color mobilizing, Civil Rights, and youth culture/gangs) that are co-opted into cK one’s surface styling. Subaltern
voices are normalized and homogenized into trendsetting potential,
and ultimately divested of the counter-hegemonic resistance and political power these movements represent within their specific contexts.
cK one and commoditized hybridity function around the psychic
and social ambivalence of their reception; that is, they enact a dual
recognition and disavowal of difference. They operate on the ability to
hold two contradictory beliefs. This disavowal of difference—I know
very well that all people are not equal in the United States due to
racism, labor exploitation, homophobia, classism, sexism, and so on,
but nevertheless, I believe that everyone is equal and can be “one”—is
structured on the dual recognition of: (1) racial inequality and (2) the
multicultural promise that enables the political meanings of these photographs to circulate in the first place. The irreconcilable moments of
the postcolonial fantasy are, on the one hand, acknowledging the
racial injustices that pervade our histories, and on the other hand,
allowing the persistence of hope—hope that we all can live in a society
where any subject position is possible—to endure.
37
In this regard, the cK one photos disavow realities of racism, homophobia, sexism, classism, heterosexism, and ethnocentrism. They posture
a notion of multiculturalism as the first moment without deconstructing
U.S. hegemonic monoculturalisms that give rise to these injustices in the
first place. The ads imagine a state of racialized utopia by omitting
the bodies (Third World gendered laborers) that produce Calvin Klein
clothing and accessories, and the bodies (coalitional solidarities) that give
the ads’ ersatz multiculturalism their loaded significations. Calvin Klein
embodies, therefore, a tremendous power differential as a component of
capital, or as Mercer would say, as “an apparatus of power.”9
But Calvin Klein’s force is not omnipotent, and photographic images
travel. In this fluid process of consistent dissemination and reception
(day after day, month after month, over a period of years), the ads’
meanings evolve and redevelop, reconstituting, shifting, rupturing, and
reinscribing the photographs’ intended purpose—to sell. Specific communities will take these images to their individual locations of culture;
they will take their specific experiences, identifications, and alliances
and infuse the images with their own consequence and authority.
Enabling alternative and multiple subject positions, the conditions
of production and reception surrounding cultural hybridity constitute
new forms of associations and identifications. I look at this cK one
photograph specifically to examine the ways in which commoditization and co-optation are central to capitalism and postmodernism. In
focusing on the usages of cultural representation and the production
of “multicultural” difference as commodities within economies of
fashion in the United States, I am interested in the ways in which concepts of postmodern cultural hybridity—the interstices between and
among race, class, gender, and sexuality described by Trinh Minh-ha,
Gloria Anzaldua, Homi Bhabha, and others—become recolonized by
multicultural fashion campaigns in the form of commoditized hybridity. And, more importantly, I am interested in the work that is done to
redeem the political value that hybridity signifies within this inevitable
transformation. Is recolonization the final step, the last word? For reasons I mention above, I argue that it is not. Certainly menacing appropriations, destructions, and falsifications of crucial political work
occur, but the author’s intent is never the final word.
* * *
A number of issues can be interrogated in these ads in relation to
commoditized hybridity—for example, flagrant appropriations of an
38
Laura J. Kuo
urban 1980s–1990s queer/ACT UP style/sensibility and “in-yourface” street politics and fashion. While this essay attempts to interrogate an insidious conflation of sexual and racial difference vis-à-vis
commoditized hybridity, my larger project focuses more markedly on
racial difference as commodity. I believe that in these ads race is the
primary project, with sexuality, class, and ethnicity manipulated
specifically around the provocative 1990s race question. In the cK one
photographs, “race” is the hegemonic signifier, while sexuality, class,
and ethnicity seem secondary or conditional; that is, they seem to be
placed in the service of race.10
However, race is both foregounded and elided in the photos
through a homogenization of gender and sexuality. An effective collapse of gender difference serves as the stage for both centering race
as the subversive spectacle of difference, and depleting racial difference of its political import. This process in which hybridity is commoditized (race ⫽ gender ⫽ sexuality ⫽ unisex ⫽ one ⫽ cK one)
stages race in such a way that difference ceases to matter. This practice of both homogenizing and accentuating race, for effect, is reminiscent of ideological representations of gender in radical/liberal
feminism.11
The cK one photos establish hybrid racial relations through biologistic portrayals of appearance. The staging of the models constructs
whiteness as a racial essence cosmetically arranged with “other” racial
essences in order to convey an impression of harmony/unity/solidarity.
In this respect, cK one potentially closes off a space to discuss the different positions whites and people of color occupy in relation to practice,
history, and social formations, and structures and relations of power.
Through juxtapositions of differently racialized bodies in its ads—
which are staged against a homologous black and white backdrop—
cK one constructs a notion of multiraciality that postures as social
diversity. The hybrid figures of 1990s fashion are bodies on which a
racialized seamlessness/sameness is inscribed. The models in cK one
photos are racially diverse, and when they are staged together they signify the currency of a multicultural decade. Their bodies are arranged
together and “equalized” in a contrived dynamic through photographic distortion and a deliberate homogeneity of height, weight,
pose, style, and expression that invokes a sense of cultural similarity,
of oneness. The images are presented in black and white, creating
a ground tone of similarity against which difference, as separation,
is muted, and heterogeneity is emphasized. The models are always
39
already in contact, integrated, and hybrid. They are aesthetically
seductive—extremely cool, hip, and sexy—and they become part of
the lure to cK one-ness. The models of color appear to be “one” with
the white models, creating an illusion of common social and economic
positions and cultural identifications. The commoditization of hybridity
takes rich heterogeneous spaces of racial and cultural diversity and
turns these spaces of promise against their potential, effectively disrupting their ability to spawn real social change. It recolonizes desirable
and hopeful formulations of cultural hybridity and transforms them
into weapons against the spectator. In short, these ads erase historical
memory and social analysis, offering fragrance in return.
The contextlessness of cK one characterizes literal and theoretical
investments on the part of popular culture in portraying complicated
social relations as just another pretty picture. This constitutes an
assault on millions of people who strive for the possibility of antiracist
coalitions, many of whom have spent their lives fighting uphill battles
for social justice. Contrary to their surface imagery, the photos of cK
one and similar ad campaigns evince a racial crisis in this country that
should not go unaddressed.
In an image such as the “Jenny, Kate & Company” prototype, what
gap is closed by the fetish of commoditized hybridity? What is papered
over? What is solved? What is at stake? How does this image address
the problem of the other, or the problem of market multiculturalism?
What does “the nation” want, and what does cK one offer?
In the United States, “the nation” aspires toward oneness.12 cK one
offers one nation in a bottle where people—different, but fundamentally
similar—become one. In the melding of bodies, the fetishistic bottling
of heterogeneity—wherein the bottle is literalized as the fetish— multiculturalism becomes falsely material. Behind this photograph and its
attempt at representing postmodern difference is an absent other: the
sweatshop worker who produces the clothes in which the models are
dressed (which also bear the Calvin Klein label), and those whose reallife experiences of political violence contradict the utopian muliticultural vision that the Calvin Klein Corporation so stylishly offers. What
gets fetishistically sutured by commoditized hybridity is an era of
racial antagonism, California’s propositions 187, 184, 209, 227, and
their discontents. cK one recolonizes the liminal “Third Space” sweatshop body, and the liminal space of postmodern hybridity.
What is so compelling about indiscriminate applications of multiculturalism within advertising is that multiculturalism becomes a
40
Laura J. Kuo
bandwagon of opportunity for everyone—it can take anyone anywhere.
Politicians—be they Republican or Democrat—can lobby against
affirmative action legislation, while radical and liberal feminists can
push for universal sisterhood; in each instance, a “multicultural”
agenda is evoked. The 1996 passage of anti-affirmative action legislation, the so-called California Civil Rights Initiative (Proposition 209),
demonstrates perfectly the strategic possibility for the conservative right
to utilize a discourse of multiculturalism to abolish affirmative action.
* * *
Hybridity has always been a preexisting reality, and like multiculturalism, the mainstreaming of it gives it a fad-like quality—as if here
today, gone tomorrow (or next month at least). Indeed, cK one as a
multicultural ad campaign is no more. The new wave of cK one ads
(which premiered in the United States in December 1998) feature individual head shots of a middle-aged White man with stubble, a waifish
young white woman with freckles, and a somewhat nondescript
young white man with freckles accompanied by the taglines
“[email protected],” “[email protected],” and “[email protected]”
respectively. It was not until October 1999 that a model of color,
“[email protected]”—a biracial Black/Asian woman—appeared in
this subsequent cK one campaign. This relative dearth of people of
color in the new campaign is a pronounced departure from the
hybridized images that once sold cK one and a curious commentary on
the state of multicultural difference as we enter the new millennium.
(It seems that computer/e-mail access are now required if one is to
participate in the oneness of cK one.)
But hybridity is not temporal. It is a consciousness, a state of being,
seeing, and perceiving that defines social and psychic identity and relations. In this work, it is also a beginning, a conceptual instrument to
refigure coalition and community. If cK one commits an enactment of
false community, then what kinds of political community can be
enabled by another concept of hybridity; that is, a concept of hybridity where the value of the term is not contingent upon a static and
hegemonic order, but rather is reinvented and evolving constantly in
and through cross-coalitional dialogue, friction, organization,
exchange, and mobilization.
Hybridity stands staunchly against the American melting pot
and its teleology of homogenization. The teleology of cK one is the
individual—the American within a hybrid context. One could say, in this
41
regard, that the teleology of multiculturalism is assimilation, while
that of hybridity is heterogeneity. cK one professes to celebrate a
vision of cultural hybridity. Yet cK one represents a state of cultural
homogeneity by recolonizing racial and cultural perceptions of heterogeneity in the form of commoditized hybridity. cK one claims to assert
the multicultural diversity so popular in political and social discourses
of the 1990s. In reality, it is mere testimony to the facile way in which
racial difference is most often regarded. The photographic images presented in cK one advertisements are anathema to racial difference.
These ads exemplify the co-optation of racial and cultural difference—
and the erasure of the urgent political issues that lie therein—by mainstream multiculturalism, via commoditized hybridity.
It is given that the cK one ad campaign functions ideologically to
support the Calvin Klein Cosmetics Corporation and, by extension,
the U.S. economy. The cultural mainstream buys into the image and
Calvin Klein’s profits are boosted. The political value of the ads is
derived from coalitional work that has nothing to do with fashion or
fragrance; it accrues through exploitative U.S./Third World labor
practices, and Calvin Klein receives the proceeds. That is, economic
value is assigned to the Calvin Klein Corporation. But what are the
relations between the ad’s material exploitation of the work of labor
and their appropriation of the material work of coalition? What are
the relations between the bodies that produce these kinds of work?
The marketing appeal of hybridity is neither directed toward nor
absorbed by white consumers exclusively. People of color can be
enfranchised—or, more accurately, gain a kind of mainstream cultural
currency—through the selling power of hybridity and multiculturalism. At one level, the commoditization of hybridity enfranchises communities of color to participate in cultural performance and American
citizenship. Yet, at the same time, the commoditization of hybridity
also represses and exploits those communities whose labor produces
the goods in question. To assume that coalition happens on one
level—that a participant of U.S./Third World coalitional struggles in
the academy, for example, who can buy Calvin Klein products protests
on the same grounds as an immigrant laborer who (may produce but)
cannot afford the same products—further erases the exploitation of
U.S./Third World labor within the space of resistance.
While it appears that the cK one advertisements represent a level of
cultural savvy in staging photographic images of racial heterogeneity
and hybridity, they also contain decidedly depoliticized racial representations. These ads present innocuous images of Americanness—of
42
Laura J. Kuo
“community”—that appear both candid and believable. The decontextualized and somewhat fantastical photographic representations of
solidarity/coalition between whites and people of color is a misleading
portrayal of the general racial climate in the United States. In particular, these representations mask labor practices that exploit people of
color. For example, in order to maximize high profits, large fashion
corporations that do not move their factories overseas for “cheap”
labor call on subcontractors in the United States to create a number of
small-scale local sewing workshops. These workshops often employ
undocumented immigrant women, or those who have recently emigrated to the United States, to work for wages criminally below the
minimum wage. Benetton is a case in point; the company employs subcontractors to perform 40 percent of their knitting and 60 percent of
their garment assembly.13 Workers in shops like these often are held
captive under the threat of deportation.
While corporate production continues to soar and fashion industry
lobbyists continue to extinguish sweatshop reform bills, conditions for
immigrant women laborers remain dismal. Sewing is often the only
viable employment option for many immigrant women, who become
vulnerable targets of employers seeking cheap labor. According to the
Asian Immigrant Women’s Advocates (AIWA) Garment Workers’
Justice Campaign, conditions they observed in sweatshops include
children as young as eight sewing buttons and cutting cloth, elderly
workers paid as little as 50 cents an hour and others—particularly
Vietnamese—earning far below the minimum wage, employees forbidden to talk or go the bathroom, bosses keeping phony time cards
and business records to fool labor inspectors, employers forcing workers to pay the fines when inspectors cite their shops.14
In her essay, “Colonialism and Modernity,” Aihwa Ong describes
the tendency of hegemonic feminisms to construct U.S./Third World
women workers as victims of patriarchy and capitalism, as well as to
treat gender and sexuality outside the specificities of indigenous meanings and lived realities. Ong points to the practice of white feminists
enacting masculinist paradigms and reinstalling notions of cultural
superiority by fixing U.S./Third World women as a universal and
undifferentiated category. This fetishistic commoditization of U.S./Third
World workers elides their agency as laborers who achieve their own
processes of self-actualization through individual and collective
means. In the cK one photographs, the Third World subject—and
third space hybridity—is usurped into an economy that either obliterates the racist imagery of the sweatshop worker and replaces it with
43
something infinitely more politically fashionable (hybridity), or an
economy that never recognizes the exploitative histories experienced
by Third World laborers in the first place.
This raises rather complicated questions of which histories are read
on which bodies by which people. cK one obviously does not assume
a mass homogenous audience; cK one does not even assume a homogenous spectacle in its representation—the spectacle is hybrid. What is
so fascinating, then, are the loaded memories/connections cK one’s
images should evoke with regard to diasporic histories of immigration,
migration, and political exile in this country. And what is so problematic about the reception of these ads at the level of the mainstream is
that one can never be too certain which historical memories are paid
homage to—or, indeed, whether any are. What Ong’s work raises for
my project is the further complication of precisely what it means to
open up a space to engage discursive transnational labor politics, for
there is danger as well as promise in this process. While the Asian
female transnational laborer is overdetermined within most discourses/
representations regarding market and labor economies within EuroAmerican feminisms, Calvin Klein effaces her whole existence. She
was never exploited; why, she’s one of us—she’s cK one.
The construction of alliance between racial groups in postmodern
“multicultural advertising” (friendship, “hanging out,” love, sex, etc.)
is conveyed through a particular representation of whiteness and its
affective identification with communities of color. In the way these ads
attempt to construct micro-utopias of oneness—eliding political realities of exploitation, oppression, and inequality in this country—they
can be as damaging as blatantly racist images (where the viewer at
least knows explicitly what s/he is dealing with). I argue that politics
of coalition among—hybridized communities of color—and more
pointedly between white communities and communities of color—
never can be innocuous or utopian. They are so much more fraught,
and their achievements and failures are infinitely more interesting cK
one is a commodity; it is not coalition. The political reality of sweatshop practices within the U.S. fashion economy and the
disproportionate number of women of color who work under abhorrent conditions to clothe the models who appear in cK one ads
point to a reprehensible disparity between the ersatz citizenship/
oneness cK one strives to evoke/create and the economic realities of
racial and cultural “difference” in this country. There is real work
being done to establish coalition in circuits such as U.S./Third World
feminist labor unions in the textile industry, for example, and this
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Laura J. Kuo
work—indeed, the historical conditions that give rise to it—is
rendered invisible, in fact unnecessary, by the representations of multicultural bliss proffered by/in cK one ads.
The potential for cross-racial and cultural work around labor
issues, for example, is fundamental, and the value of this work is
undermined by cK one, where coalition is falsely and erroneously
staged. cK one represents a place in time where struggle never preceded the arrival of multiculturalism, thereby denigrating the crucial
issues constantly contested in activist arenas for possibilities of real
coalition. cK one attests to the grim racial/political climate of market
multiculturalism and the potential dangers of its tendency toward
reckless abandon. Of course, one may argue that cK one is “just a
product”—read: “just an ad” or “just a photograph”—and it could be
just a film, just a text, or just another appalling political candidate. But
this does not lessen its power of persuasion; given cK one’s transnational advertising scope, with its photographic images sprawling
across billboards, magazines, television, buses, and subway stations,
its influence is far-reaching.
The traveling of multiculturalism’s values and meanings is multidirectional; that is, it moves from the streets to the corporate offices,
and back again, making random pitstops along the way. Coalition—
individual and collective political mobilization—is too powerful to
be evacuated of multiculturalism’s transformative political charge by
co-optive marketing tactics. Its values and interests can never, in
the end, be finally appropriated or co-opted. Calvin Klein Cosmetic
Company relinquishes its power over the ads the moment the photos and all of their refracted meanings enter the public sphere and
are received, interpreted, and taken up by communities of individuals
who reinscribe meanings according to their specifics of home and
place.
In this regard, Calvin Klein’s depictions of race and sexuality in
cK one harbor subversive possibilities. These possibilities are imminent
for those who identify with the images and feel a sense of cultural
acknowledgment in the representations, as well as for those whose
racist imaginaries are disrupted by the ad’s multicultural nature
(“They’re hugging!”). At the University of California, Santa Cruz, a
cK one ad was photocopied onto outreach flyers and wheat-pasted all
over the campus in an attempt to organize queer students of color on
campus. Regardless of this subversive appropriation of the advertisement, the attention ultimately reflects back onto Calvin Klein, and
45
popularity (read: sales) of the company’s products soar. But did these
students convene? Yes, they did.
* * *
Calvin Klein is a trendsetter, a cultural genius. He constantly redefines
what is sexy and what is hot, thereby maintaining his distinguished
position at the forefront of global fashion. Part of his seductive
appeal—and indeed that of the corporate entity that bears his name—
lies in his relentless opposition to the mainstream. From the 1970s
eroticization of the neophyte Brook Shields, where “nothing comes
between her and her Calvins,” to the 1980s pro-sex/nudity/orgy
Obsession campaign in an era of reclaiming sex and feminism from
the clench of antiporn/antisex radical feminists, to the 1990s dialogic
of racialized hybrid waifs, “scandalous” prepubescent “pornography”
and “heroin-in vogue” in cK one, cK jeans, and cK be, respectively,
Calvin Klein has changed the look of fashion. He fixes himself at the
cutting edge of culture, constantly reinventing fashion and style,
enraging the conservative mainstream and recreating the image(s) of
counter culture(s).15
The Calvin Klein ads in question are taken up in a variety of different
political struggles. Both the photographic images and mainstream
notions of multiculturalism operate on disavowal of difference and
its ambivalences—is it exploitation? Can it be identification? The disavowal of difference—I know very well that people are different . . . but
nevertheless, I believe that everyone is equal—conflates the multiple
vectors of heterogeneous multiculturalisms. This disavowal of the
advertisement is at the level of structure of the photograph, and not
at the level of intent of power. cK one is structured on dual recognition
of (1) racial inequality ideologies, and (2) multicultural promise that
an Asian dyke can be “equal” to an elderly white woman.16
Multiculturalism is structured by the postColonial imaginary and is
enabled by a post–Civil Rights fantasy. It operates on the ability to
hold two contradictory beliefs at once. They are on one hand, a continuing racial inequity and the persistence of monocultural allegiances
in this country, and on the other, a belief in multiculturalism’s promise
to move beyond facile prescriptions of identity and difference, and to
achieve heterogeneous alliances to mobilize for social change.
Through my analysis of cK one, I have sought to demonstrate the
reductive ways in which people of color become inscribed as signifiers
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Laura J. Kuo
of difference within market multiculturalism or commoditized hybridity,
in ways that have less to do with social transformation than with
marketing strategies. I am interested in hybridity as more than the mere
realization of difference as the point of departure from whiteness,
more than mere reaction to the myth of purity, more than the mere
reinscription of hybridity as a commodity form, and certainly as
more than the sensibly political correct way to be at this late-twentiethcentury moment. Hybridity holds so much more promise. Perhaps by
theorizing a model for heterogeneous coalitional possibility through
hybridity, we can begin to motivate cultural pluralism and relativism
in directions that prompt alternative political, emotional, social, intellectual, and physical ways of being and relating. In a world of infinite
diversity and multiple contexts, we owe it to ourselves to do this work.
Notes
1. This essay was completed in November 1999.
2. While this essay revolves around the “Jenny, Kate & Company” prototype
photograph (which is reproduced herewith), my discussion here applies to the
entire series of related photos that comprised the inaugural cK one ad campaign. Thus, I refer alternately to the photo(s) and the ad(s), as well as to the
campaign itself.
3. My definitions here rely upon an understanding that commoditized hybridity is
deployed as a strategy within mainstream multiculturalism. In other words,
mainstream multiculturalism is a structure within which commoditized hybridity functions as a vehicle/strategy, specifically for marketing purposes, precluding transformative possibilities that recognize, embrace, and acknowledge the
need to negotiate difference.
4. Calvin Klein Cosmetics press packet obtained from the company’s New York
publicity office (212-759-8888) in 1995.
5. In the Summer of 1996, Calvin Klein released cK be, the latest Calvin Klein fragrance on the market, yet cK one continues to be simultaneously publicized
with cK be, and maintains its eminent popularity.
6. cK one launched their product in September, 1994 with these ads. In the
Calvin Klein Cosmetic press kit the campaign theme is listed as “Jenny, Kate &
Company” and “White T-shirt & Company.” “Worldwide Fragrance
Distribution” includes: Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, The Netherlands,
Portugal, Greece, Spain, Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Argentina,
Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Venezuela, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong,
Macao, S. Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, U.K., Mexico, Singapore, Malaysia,
Indonesia, Philippines, UAE, Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Kuwait, Panama, Costa
Rica, Columbia, 1995. U.S., Canada, Worldwide Military, 1994.
7. There were four ads in the 1994 cK one “Jenny, Kate & Company” series,
each varying slightly from the others; i.e., the ads sometimes replaced one or
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
47
two figures on the right side of the double panel with an image of a cK one
bottle, or panels were cut and pasted onto separate covers, presenting the
figure(s) by themselves, out of context from the original ad.
I make reference here to Stuart Hall’s essay entitled “The After-life of Frantz
Fanon: Why Fanon, Why Now? Why Black Skin, White Masks?” in The Fact
of Blackness, edited by Alan Read (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996).
Kobera Mercer, “Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia” in Mirage:
Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire, edited by Ragnar Farr (London:
Institute of Contemporary Art, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995),
52, 15–55.
On two occasions, when I presented earlier drafts of this paper, the racial/
ethnic signification of the models took primacy over the signification of
sexuality—namely the queering of the ads—in the discussions that followed
my presentations. While these instances represent neither an ethnographic
citation nor the empirical evidence on which I base the theoretical postulations
of my work, they do indicate the predominance of race in the ads’ reception. Of
course, categories of identity are never separate, and it is not my intention to
classify these areas of identification.
Difference in the context of radical/liberal feminism is constituted in such a
way that racial difference, class difference, nationhood, and ethnicity do not
figure specifically into the overall cause of feminist global unity. Yet, it is precisely through the tokenistic inscription of race vis-à-vis unity within liberal
feminism that notions of collectivity and common identity are invoked.
One may say that this aspiration is reflected in President Clinton’s “Initiative
on Race.” It is important to note that these “town hall meetings” on “race
relations” have approached the issue at the level of individual relations, as
opposed to addressing the larger and far more significant question of historical, institutionalized racism.
Enloe, Cynthia, Bananas, Beaches, and Bases: Making Sense of International
Politics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 156.
San Jose Mercury News, Turn-of-century abuses pervade sewing shops,
Johnson, Steve; A1; March 28, 1991.
In August of 1995, at the outset of the cK jeans campaign, the FBI investigated
Calvin Klein for possible violatations of pornography laws in connection with
risqué images of pubescent “teenagers.” This scandal swept the mainstream
media in the United States from August 1995 to February 1996, when Klein
finally pulled the offending images and re-devised the campaign. In February,
1999 a cK children’s underwear advertisement had to be removed from
Times Square one hour after it was mounted due to virulent protest by
Mayor Giuliani and his constituents (NewYork Post, February 18, 1999).
A lesbian model Jenny Shimizu was one of the principal figures in the original
cK one ads. One of the many renditions of the cK one television campaign
included the 1997 version with an elderly white woman saying, “All for one,
one for all” in a British accent.
3
Albita’s Queer Nations and U.S. Salsa Culture
. . . if the border is the space of a cheek to cheek, it is also a war zone.1
Sometimes opting to return to the homeland is like a trip, in the narcotic sense, in the
sense of subsistence and love.2
What we choose to remember about the past, where we begin and end our retrospective accounts, and who we include and exclude from them—these do a lot to
determine how we live and what decisions we make in the present.3
Track One
Ripping off the cellophane wrap, forcing open the plastic case, I search
for her. She sits, waiting, reclining in a wooden chair. She watches as I
read her body. Her unwavering gaze shows an awareness of the ways
in which bodies, women’s bodies in particular, are read by wandering
eyes. Still, my eyes wander, mapping the contours of her body. . . . I
purchased Albita’s No se parece a nada (1995) because her aesthetic
spoke to my desire for a lesbian presence in U.S. salsa culture. As her
title indicates, No se parece a nada, she is like nothing I had ever
encountered in hegemonic salsa culture, a field of cultural production
and communal gathering that is heteronormative to the point of
homophobia. Albita’s figuration of butchness on the compact disc’s
front and back covers provided me—and my femme desire—with a
place inside salsa’s rigid codes of gender and sexuality. The compact
disc’s internal imagery revealed feminine markers—high heels and
50
manicured fingernails—that further satisfied my desire for an archive
of diverse sexual identities in U.S. salsa culture.
In Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto
Rican Cultures, Frances Aparicio argues that because women salsa
artists exist in a genre of music dominated by male artists, salseras are
compelled to engage the dynamics of gender and sexuality.4 Augusto
Puleo offers a similar appraisal of salsa music: “The woman projected
in salsa songs is only represented as a source of pain and pleasure, but
never as a person in her own right.”5 Puleo and Aparicio interpret the
elaborate costumes of salseras such as La India and the late Celia Cruz
as a means of feminizing salsa’s public male-centered spaces and critiquing the genre’s heteronormative masculinism.6 In the words of
Augusto Puleo:
The visual display of spangled dresses, furs, gold teeth, diamonds, along
with all the sumptuous and desirable aspects of their body [sic] help to
reclaim female sexuality from being an objectification of male desire to
a representation of female desire.7
What goes unsaid but underlies Aparicio’s and Puleo’s reading of elaborate, staged femininities is the notion that women’s adorned bodies
serve as points of connection between colonized island nations and
diasporic subjects; women’s bodies in salsa culture, in other words,
come to reconstitute the nation and thus strengthen hegemonic discourses of gender and sexuality that imagine women as “symbolic
bearers of the nation.”8
Albita’s performance of butchness on her first U.S. release, No se
parece a nada, departs from the feminine incursions of her peers,
La India and Celia Cruz. She refuses to mother the nation.
On the front cover of No se parece a nada, Albita is decentered and
overexposed. She gazes at her imagined audience with forlorn, almost
pleading eyes. Her vintage apparel calls forth memories of displacement from islands whose histories have long been enmeshed, Cuba
and Puerto Rico. Though herself Cuban, Albita’s longing for her
homeland and location in U.S. salsa culture speaks to the concerns of
another ethnonational formation whose residence in the U.S. stems
from continued colonialism—Puerto Rico—and in this sense, her
music and visual design reflect cultural traditions that exceed the
geopolitical landscape of the nation. In other words, Albita’s erotic
body politic comes to signify the historical and immediate concerns of
diasporic Caribbean communities who share histories of displacement.
Albita’s Queer Nations
51
The chromatic technique of the photograph encourages intense
feelings of nostalgia; the use of sepia tones historicizes the figure of
Albita, while the photograph’s background lacks depth and demurs
from emphasizing a specific locality. Albita thus appears shrouded in
nostalgia—her clothing and downhearted facial expression combine
with the photograph’s aesthetic qualities to recall 1940s Havana, San
Juan, and Spanish Harlem, the time before the communist revolution
in Cuba and the launching of operation bootstrap in Puerto Rico.
Albita’s transhistorical attire also works to challenge that longstanding gendered conventions of U.S. salsa culture—the colorful rumbera
dresses of salseras like Celia Cruz and the staid suits of salseros such
as Marc Anthony and Gilberto Santa Rosa. Her image thus functions
to invoke nostalgic longing for homelands beyond the geopolitical
boundaries of the United States while simultaneously providing the
semblance of a forthright articulation of lesbian desire in a field that is
decidedly heteronormative and masculinist.
Albita’s selection of material on No se parece a nada reveals the
extent of her incursion into salsa’s masculinist space. The disc’s first
track, “Que manera de quererte,” first released on the soundtrack for
The Specialist (1995), engages in a critical dialogue with Gilberto
Santa Rosa, a salsero whose music exemplifies salsa rómantica and
who released his own version of the song that same year. Albita’s interpretation of the song includes cries of explicit sexual desire, while
Gilberto Santa Rosa’s song is more expressive of sensuality than sex.
Figure 3.1 Albita: No Se Parce A Nada.
52
For example, when Albita calls for “sexo” [sex], Rosa calls for nurturing intimacy, preferring the term, “seno” [breast]. Albita’s emphasis
on sexual desire and the sex act works to affirm women’s desires,
while her rendition of the song confronts the genre’s central male figures as epitomized by Gilberto Santa Rosa.
“Que manera de quererte” offers a seductive articulation of pleasure. It includes a stream of intensifying, rhetorical questions that
address specific body parts. While the song does not state the sex of
the body that is being reassembled with each passing stanza, it
includes repeated references to lips, blood, and delirium. Albita’s
deep-throated articulation of boca, sangre, and delirio suggest lesbian
desire. Augusto Puleo relates that accentuation of the mouth
“reclaims the female body as a site of power and hope,” while
Yarbro-Bejarano notes that for women, “the mouth and cunt merge,
[as] both [are] represented as organs of speech and sexuality.”9
Albita’s compact disc imagery and her rendition of songs such as
“Quien le prohibe [Who Outlawed It?]” and “Solo porque vivo [Just
Because I Exist]” combine to accentuate her departure from the
genre’s rigid gender codes. Albita’s “unexpected surges . . . create an
effect of excess that disrupts the conventional level of the lyrics, opening the music to other readings, and other pleasures.”10 Albita’s erotic
body politic—her muscular contralto, her incessant longing for a homeland she cannot access, her fitted suits and manicured fingernails—
transgresses salsa’s heteronormative masculinism and enable me to
claim salsa music as my own.
Track Two
Albita’s transgression of normative discourses of gender and sexuality
on No se parece a nada is as much an example of the corporate management of salsa music as it is an exercise in cultural critique.
According to press reports, Albita’s image was created by representatives of Double Xxposure’s Latino Division.11 Reflecting upon her new
image, Albita stated:
Eso yo se lo dejo a los expertos, me pongo en manos de los que saben,
porque yo a la verdad que no entiendo mucho de esas cosas. Lo unico
que te puedo decir es que me gusta la ropa comoda, que me permita
mover en escena y que pueda ser yo y punto.
I left my image to the experts. I put myself in knowing hands
because, in truth, I don’t understand this stuff. The only thing I can tell
53
you is that I like comfortable clothing that allows me to move and be
myself onstage.12
In delving deeper into the compact disc’s imagery, it becomes apparent
that transnational corporations—Crescent Moon, Epic Records
Group, and Sony Music Entertainment—are capitalizing on Albita’s
transgression. Their logos bisect Albita’s body, making her suggestion
of lesbianism a means of facilitating transnational capitalism and
accessing queer Latino dollars.
Indeed, Albita made her U.S. debut alongside the rise of “lesbian
chic” as a marketing gimmick. In the words of Linda Dittmar:
. . . masculinized attire invokes fantasies of dynamic, autonomous
women, even as details feminize their images and compromise this masculinity. Often the images simultaneously float and submerge the
women’s subcultural signifiers of the unruly. . . . Such systems of checks
and balances are essential to the reciprocities of incitement and restraint
in which the fashion industry is so deeply invested. The idea of mingling
innocence with experience, chastity with desire, exposure with barriers
to sight and sound, allure with its prohibition, has always played a
major part in defining fashion as a discourse of desire as well as a
discourse of class, age, occupation, ethnicity, and other affiliations.13
Commercial popular culture, in other words, uses seductive imagery
to erase the violence of capitalist economic processes, to “incite desire
and invite reverie (en route to consumption)” and maintain class
privilege.14 Albita’s figure is emblematic of this trend in fashion and
the broader popular culture of the 1990s.
Of course, salsa has long carried the imprint of capitalism—its existence depends upon technologies of reproduction and dissemination.
Albita shares this understanding of the recording and marketing of her
music: “what is called salsa is just a form of commercialism. But it is
clearly música cubana.”15 While the music’s origins remain a site of
contestation among scholars and aficionados, Albita’s comment
bespeaks an awareness of the music’s dependence on and relation to
global economic processes.
Track Three
While Albita’s erotic body politic makes a space for the commercialization of racialized lesbian iconography, Albita’s aesthetic has the
54
double-function of normalizing the preferential governmental treatment accorded to educated, upper-class Cubans who “defect” to the
United States—even the term “defection” reveals the enduring success
of anticommunist sentiment and the power of U.S. Cubans to represent themselves as exiles rather than immigrants.16 Albita came to the
United States after having recorded two albums, produced by the government of Cuba, that became the nation’s largest-selling export
albums. It is these albums that enabled Albita y su grupo the “freedom”
to live and work in Columbia and tour the socialist festival circuit in
Eastern Europe.17 In 1993, after the release of her second record in
Cuba and in the wake of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Albita y
su grupo decided to defect to the United States. One journalist narrated their defection as follows:
In 1993 the band secretly began discussing defection. After a musical gig
abroad in Columbia, they flew to Mexico. The unsuspecting Cuban
government had obligingly given them exit visas, believing the purpose
of the trip was to cut a new record there.
The next leg of their flight to freedom would, they hoped, take the
nine of them to the United States. That assumed an understanding
American government would consider them political exiles and grant
them entry visas. Anxious days passed without word from the U.S.
embassy.
Even when word came that visas were approved and waiting, the
jittery refugees feared that they might be spotted by Cuban spies if
they attempted to pick up the visas in Mexico City. They decided to
cross the border by way of a less conspicuous route. After a dangerous
trek that included scaled fences, they found themselves on a busy downtown El Paso street. Within hours, a smiling entourage winged their
way to Miami—and to the beginning of a new life.18
Another journalist offered this narrative:
White, black, and Chinese Cuban, with shaved heads and buzz cuts,
they simply sauntered over the bridge into El Paso, Tex., seemingly
invisible to the Border Patrol in their ethnic diversity and funkiness.
They took a taxi to a mall, bought ice cream cones to calm their nerves
and made a collect call to Miami.
Within hours, a radio station there that calls itself “The Most
Cuban” had raised the money to pay their way to Florida. At first, they
lived like genuine refugees, either to a couple of rooms. Miriam Wong,
Albita’s manager, worked construction jobs by day and sewed into the
night so that Albita would be free to write songs.
55
But that did not last long. Within a year, Albita, now 34, has been
adopted by the glitterati of South Beach, most notably Madonna, and
taken under the wing of Emilio Estefan, Gloria Estefan’s husband and
producer. She was already, in the words of her press agent, Tinga Lopez,
“a product.”19
Having been granted political asylum upon her arrival, Albita y su
grupo began performing in small Miami clubs. The group signed onto
Emilio Estefan’s label, Crescent Moon, several months later and shortened their name to Albita. Shortly after signing the contract with
Crescent Moon, Albita reflected upon her exiled status in the United
States: “It’s all like a happy dream . . . , and I’ll take happiness over
drama anytime. . . . I’ve been trying for happiness and to follow my
musical aspirations for a long time. Inevitably, I do it because it’s in me,
like my eyes, my hair, myself.”20 An American Dream, indeed. And,
one enabled by crossing the U.S.–Mexico border at El Paso—Juarez.
The celebratory journalistic narrative of Albita’s defection to the
United States contrasts with the legislative treatment of poorer Cubans.
Since the arrival of close to 125,000 Cubans from the port city of
Mariel in 1980, several hundred of these refugees have been incarcerated in INS detention facilities, having been denied asylum status in
the United States but ineligible for deportation to their homeland.21
Kevin R. Johnson assesses the preferential treatment of educated,
upper-class Cubans in the following passage:
When viewed as white, educated, and middle and upper class, and
refugees of communism, Cubans fared well. When the popular construction of the migrants changed around the time of the Mariel
Boatlife—as blacker, poorer, and undesirable, the legal treatment
became stricter. Similarly, the racialization of Mexicans as dark, poor,
uneducated, long has rationalized their harsh treatment under immigration laws. Thus, over time, we see the evolving racialization of Cubans
in a way that makes them more resemble Mexican immigrants. Changes
in the racialization of Cubans create the potential for future political
coalitions challenging immigration law and enforcement.22
Albita’s treatment, like that of her peers, contrasts with the treatment
of other national groups, Mexicans in particular: According to statistics from 1997 to 1998, the U.S. government spends 85 percent of its
immigrant deterrent resources on border patrol and migrants caught
along the U.S–Mexico border account for 89 percent of deportations.23 Despite the fact that undocumented immigrants from Mexico
56
account for 39–54 percent of the undocumented immigrant population, more than 90 percent of the immigrants detailed by the INS are
Mexican nationals.24
At the time of Albita’s defection to the United States, a series of
anti-immigrant initiatives were coming to dominate the political landscape of the United States, especially the western states of California,
Texas, and Arizona. For example, California’s Proposition 187, which
included provisions to ban undocumented immigrants from accessing
social services such as healthcare and education, come to initiate
heated public debates on undocumented immigration in California.
Passed on November 9, 1994 by a three to two margin, the
Proposition was authored by former Immigration and Naturalization
Service officials, Harold Ezell and Alan Nelson, after the failure of
10 similar initiatives introduced to the state assembly by Republican
Richard Mountjoy. The Proposition called for the denial of social services to persons unable to provide the proper identification and granted
border patrol and immigration officials the authority for the immediate deportation of “suspected” immigrants.
Seeking to secure his reelection, Governor Pete Wilson backed the
controversial proposition and developed an advertising campaign that
indulged the xenophobia and racism of California’s electorate while
de-emphasizing the state’s economic downturn. For example, one
commercial for Proposition 187 juxtaposed footage of immigrants
running across the Tijuana–San Diego border with a still image of
the Ellis Island Statue of Liberty. Against this backdrop, a deep masculine voice intoned, “American citizenship is a treasure beyond
measure . . . but now the rules are being broken . . . There’s a right
way and a wrong way . . . Pete Wilson has the courage to say enough
is enough, and to stand up for Californians who work hard, pay taxes,
and obey the laws.”25 The images and voiceover narration of this commercial combine to equate immigrants with criminality and laziness
while simultaneously emphasizing Pete Wilson’s commitment to
upholding U.S. policies and fulfilling the nation’s promises to its own
citizenry. This campaign included the publishing of a public letter to
President Bill Clinton that implored the President to halt immigration
and replenish state funds depleted from the care of undocumented
immigrants. Pete Wilson’s gambit was successful. He was reelected,
and the proposition garnered the support of two-thirds of White exit
poll respondents, a majority of African Americans and Asians, and even
one-third of Latinos.26 Though overturned in state court, California’s
Proposition 187 informed the writing and tenor of the federal policy
57
on immigration, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act of 1996.
Cited as the “the most diverse, divisive, and draconian immigration
law enacted since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882”27 the Illegal
Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996
revised all previous deportation and exclusion policies. The Act
requires the number of border patrol agents to double to 10,000 while
investing them with the “authority to order the removal of aliens
whom they have determined are inadmissible without providing for
further review of such decision, if aliens arrive at U.S. ports of entry
either with false documents or with no documents at all.”28 According
to David Grable, this provision violates the U.S. Constitution. In his
article, “Personhood Under the Due Process Clause: A Constitutional
Analysis of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act of 1996,” Grable uses Supreme Court decisions
and congressional legislative history to argue that this rewriting of federal immigration policies denies “aliens’ due process” and “flies in the
face of Supreme Court precedent establishing aliens’ constitutional
rights in criminal prosecution.”29 The federal law’s language echoes
the most contested dimensions of Proposition 187—its attention to
“suspect” visual and aural markers of difference and its promise to
minimize or altogether halt the delivery of social services such as health
care and education to immigrants, legal and undocumented. Cuban
immigrants who reach U.S. soil via air transportation, however, are
exempt from all the Act’s provisions, as are Puerto Ricans whose colonial relationship to the United States grants legal citizenship.30
Broad in its scope, the federal government’s Illegal Immigration
Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 inaugurates several
provisions in “defense of women.” It “renders deportable any alien
convicted, any time after entry, of a crime of domestic violence, stalking, child abuse, child neglect, or child abandonment.”31 Furthermore,
the law criminalizes female genital mutilation and forced sterilization
and sites these practices as justification for the granting of political
asylum.32 In a sense, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant
Responsibility Act of 1996 signals a new political era where the language and demands of feminism are marshaled to reinscribe state
racism and xenophobia.
Albita began the tour for her second U.S. release at the White
House, where she sang at President Clinton’s second inaugural ball.
“It was so bizarre,” reflected Albita. “There I was, draped in black
velvet, singing ‘La Guantanamera’ to the President of the United States.
58
Figure 3.2 Albita: Una Mujer Como Yo.
It wasn’t even four years since I stood at the border sweating, contemplating a complete break with my past and the possibility of no future
whatsoever.”33 Albita’s 1997 compact disc, Una mujer como yo,
erases the logistics of her own migration. On the compact disc itself,
Albita’s appears desnuda, naked, with her hands raised against an
exceedingly black background. The black and white image renders her
skin a brilliant, artificial white. On her back, stenciled into exposed
flesh, is an aesthetic rendering of the Caribbean that includes Cuba,
Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo (which houses Haiti and the Dominican
Republic), and Jamaica. Present but peripheral are Central and South
America. Texas, and the border between Mexico and the United States
at Cuidad Juarez—El Paso, is eliminated from her map.
In Albita’s diaspora, the militarized border between the United
States and Mexico is disappeared. It is as if the route that enabled
Albita y su grupo’s illegal border-crossing does not exist. This erasure
cements inconsistencies in U.S. immigration legislation and thus sanctions the preferential treatment of educated, upper-class Cubans at the
expense of poorer, darker migrants from Mexico, Cuba, and Central
Mexico. At the same time, it inscribes a separation between Mexico
and Caribbean migrants despite the increasing similarities in their
treatment by federal immigration policies.
A critical reading of Albita’ queer nations enables an evaluation of
the intersection of popular and political cultures. Seductive in terms of
its aesthetics but alarming in terms of its politics, Albita’s compact disc
imagery works to subsume and normalize inconsistencies in immigration legislation and enforcement. This tension between the intertwined
discourses of aesthetics and politics reveals that it takes more than
59
seductive aesthetic practices to challenge state violence. It takes what
Chela Sandoval calls “differential consciousness” and the creation of
“affinities-inside-of-difference” to trespass both the homegrown ideological boundaries of salsa music—its heteronormative masculinism—
and the gendered state racisms that motivate federal immigration
policies and undergrid the commercialization of minoritarian cultural
practices such as salsa.34 If we wish to actualize social justice, we need
to develop an interpretive framework that can critique the dominant
political culture that desensitizes the general public to racist immigration policies—the government-authorized registration of immigrants
from majority Muslin nations is one current example—and the
cultural industries that give them sway.
Notes
1. Sylvia Spitta “Transculturation, the Caribbean, and the Cuban-American
Imaginary” in Tropicalizations: Transcultural Representations of Latinidad,
edited by Frances Aparicio and Susana Chavez-Silverman (Dartmouth:
University of New England Press, 1997), 175.
2. Juan Carlos Quintero Herencia, “Notes Toward a Reading of Salsa” in
Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, edited by Celeste
Fraser Delgado and José Esteban Muñoz (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 1997), 204.
3. George Lipsitz. Time Passages (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 34.
4. Frances Aparicio, Listening to Salsa: Gender, Latin Popular Music, and Puerto
Rican Cultures (Hanover, NH: University of New England Press, 1998).
5. Augusto Puleo. “Una verdadera crónica del Norte: una noche con La India”
in Everynight Life: Culture and Dance in Latin/o America, edited by Celeste
Fraser Delgado and Jose Esteban Munoz (Durham, NC: Duke Unversity
Press, 1997), 225.
6. Frances Aparicio, “The Blackness of Sugar: Celia Cruz and the Performance
of (Trans)nationalism” in Cultural Studies 13(2) (1999): 223–236.
7. Puleo, Everynight Life, 231.
8. Anne McClintock, Imperial Leather: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the
Colonial Context (New York: Routledge, 1995): 354.
9. Ibid. 225.
10. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “Crossing the Border with Chabela Vargas: A Chicana
Femme’s Tribute” in Sex and Sexuality in Latin America, edited by Daniel
Balderston and Donna Guy (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 41.
11. No author, “Double Xxposure 2: Launching Image Makers for Latino
Market,” The New York Beacon, February 28, 1996.
12. Josue R. Rivas, “Albita Rodriguez: No soy politica, soy artista,” El Diario/La
Prensa, December 6, 1996.
13. Linda Dittmar. “The Straight Goods: Lesbian Chic and Identity Capital on a
Not-so-Queer Planet” in The Passionate Camera: Photography and Bodies of
Desire, edited by Deborah Bright (London: Routledge, 1998), 325–326.
60
14. Ibid., 320.
15. Phil Roura, “Roll Over, El Duque—Fireballer Albita is Ready to Render her
Best Stuff unto Caesar’s; Cuban Expatriate’s Un-Salsa is Red-Hot,” New York
Daily News, October 25, 1998.
16. The 1966 Cuban Readjustment Act established legal provisions for immigrants from Cuba, granting asylum status and citizenship to Cubans who
reach U.S. soil. Following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1989, which
led to an alarming decrease in the national economy of Cuba and a renewed
wave of defection, the United States and Cuba developed a policy whereby
Cubans who arrive via plane are granted asylum status while those arriving
via foot or boat are denied legal entry into the United States.
17. Deborah Sontag, “Song in Exile,” New York Times, March 11, 1997.
18. Gigi Anders, “Chantuese on the Loose: Cuban Singer Albita Rumbas from a
Miami Supper Club to the Billboard Latin Charts,” Hispanic Magazine,
December 13, 1995, 52.
20. Gigi Anders, “Song in Exile,” New York Times, March 11, 1997.
21. Yvette M. Mastin, “Sentenced to Purgatory: The Indefinite Detention of
Mariel Cubans,” St. Mary’s Law Review on Minority Issues 137 (2000):
137–186.
22. Kevin R. Johnson, “Comparative Racialization: Culture and National Origin
in the Latina/o Communities,” Denver University Law Review 78: 654–655.
23. Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., “America’s Schizophrenic Immigrant Policy: Race,
Class, and Reason,” Boston College Law Review 41 (2000): 768.
24. Ibid., 768.
25. Michael Peter Smith and Bernadette Tarallo. “Proposition 187: Global Trend
or Local Narrative? Examining Anti-Immigration Politics in California,
Arizona, and Texas,” International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
19(2) (1995): 666.
26. Ibid., 668.
27. Dan Danilov quoted in David Grable, “Personhood Under the Due Process
Clause: A Constitutional Analysis of the Illegal Immigration Reform
And Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996,”Cornell Law Review 83(820)
(1998): 821.
28. Austin Fragomen. “The Illegal Immigration and Immigrant Responsibility
Act of 1996: An Overview,” International Migration Review 31(2) (Summer
1997): 445.
29. David Grable, “Personhood under Due Process Clause: A Constitutional
Analysis of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act
of 1996,” Cornell Law Review 83(820) (1998): 822.
30. Fragomen, 448.
31. Ibid., 443.
32. Ibid., 453.
34. Chela Sandoval, “Mestizaje as Method: Feminists-of-Color Challenge the
Canon” in Living Chicana Theory, edited by Carla Trujillo (Berkeley, CA:
Third Woman Press, 1998), 362.
4
Beyond Pocahontas
Joanne Barker
In June 1998, I was reading through my monthly subscriptions to
News From Indian Country and Indian Country Today when I came
across an ad soliciting job applications for the U.S. Secret Service.1 I
am going to call this ad Warrior Woman (see figure 4.1). Warrior
Woman entreats “young Americans with diverse skills and backgrounds who are interested in a challenging career in federal law
enforcement.” Centered at the top of the ad in bold-faced print, the ad
seeks “a new kind of WARRIOR.” Below, an American Indian woman
stands direct in a black suit and white buttoned-up dress shirt. Behind
her left arm there is a detail of the Secret Service’s badge, shadowing
her in gray outline. In her right hand, she holds a spear garnered
with feathers and wrapped in cloth (you almost forget to notice her
polished nails, matching lipstick, and silver ring). Around her left ear,
dangling down into the inside of her jacket’s lapel, is an almost transparent ear-piece. On her lapel, there is a small silver pin in the shape
and colors of the U.S. flag. The first button on her jacket is large
and silver, bearing a design of four arrows pointing out. Framing
the bottom of the ad is the main text, overlaid another U.S. flag. The
badge centers the “Secret Service.” Below the image appears the
following text:
Everyday the U.S. Secret Service battles to protect our nation’s leaders
and financial systems. We are looking for young Americans with diverse
skills and backgrounds who are interested in a challenging career in
federal law enforcement. To find out more, give us a call.
(202) 435–5800 www.treas.gov/treasury/bureaus/usss
62
Joanne Barker
Figure 4.1 “A New Kind of Warrior,” U.S. Secret Service Advertisement.
It is a stunning ad. The image is bold; the textures and lines are
sharp; the woman is proud and powerful. For one quick moment, you
actually consider a career in federal law enforcement. And for any
woman of indigenous citizenship, that is one very long, richly complex
moment. In this essay, I would like to think about why that is so. I
begin with my own crass investigation.
Beyond Pocahontas
63
To Find out More, Give Us a Call
After seeing Warrior Woman, I ask around. According to family,
friends, and colleagues, she seems to circulate for a couple of months
in various newspapers, magazines, and journals. Tribal colleges
receive her in full poster form with no accompanying explanation or
information about the kinds of jobs that the posters are advertising.
Many end up in the trash. Meanwhile, I make some phone calls. My
first round is to the public relations department at the Secret Service. I
want to know the name of the advertising agency, photographer,
model, and any other details about the campaign and about who put
the Warrior Woman together. I also ask for a list of the specific presses
that the ad has appeared within. But I am unable to obtain any kind of
information. The Secret Service is hardly forthcoming. So, I take a different approach. A friend in Los Angeles works as a researcher for a
Japanese production firm that makes commercials and print ads for
U.S. companies to be shown in Japan. He tells me of a company in the
Midwest that, upon payment of $150, will track down all of the
details about a specific ad that you want. Apparently, advertisers often
use this type of service to secure information on photographers and
models they are interested in working with. So, I call the company.
They can find out nothing. Nothing at all.
So, I take another track. I call the Secret Service at the to find out
more number but the receptionist is more than flustered. Apparently,
Secret Service ads for jobs usually have reference numbers and when
you call for information you are sent a packet for the corresponding
job that includes detailed guidelines regarding qualifications, application procedures, and test dates (for some jobs, there is an intensive
two-year security background check). I tell the receptionist that the ad
I am looking at does not mention a specific job or include any reference numbers and that I am making a more general inquiry into the
kinds of opportunities for Indian women that the ad is announcing. To
say that I confused her would not say enough. “What job is it that you
want to apply for?” “Do you have any unique skills or interests?” “Do
you have secretarial skills, for example?” Like typing or short-hand.
“Accounting skills, perhaps?” No. “Janitorial skills? Something like
that?” Not exactly the kind of stuff that I had in mind this new kind
of WARRIOR Woman was doing nor that the ad wanted me to emulate.
After trying to explain that I just wanted to know what kinds of
opportunities that the Service had for Indians, the receptionist became
suspicious and belligerent. She demanded to know my name and from
where I was calling. When I told her I was a student at the University
64
Joanne Barker
of California, Santa Cruz, her tone relaxed somewhat but I could tell
that she still found me suspect. After several minutes, she relented and
promised to send me a brochure—which I never received—and that I
could call back if I had any further questions after reading it. She also
referred me to the website and said that I could learn more about what
the Service had to offer there. (Truly a waste of time. The page is an
internet version of a glossy brochure—telling you everything and
nothing all at the same time.)
After my pedestrian investigation, it was confirmed for me that the
ad did not really want Indian women to apply at all. It had not anticipated soliciting referrals, it merely wanted to reinvent its image
among Indian communities, or perhaps more generally, to confirm the
Service’s commitment to antiracism and antisexism in the context of
recent debates about Affirmative Action policies. (Like Chevron’s
environmental awareness TV ads in the wake of its own destruction of
U.S. reserves.) Maybe the Service was hoping to instill reassurance
among Indian communities that any Indian person working for a U.S.
federal law enforcement agency is trustworthy, proud, and deserving
of respect? Maybe they hoped for more cooperation given their affirmation of all of the “skills and backgrounds” Indian people have to
offer? In either or any case, the ad is most decidedly not a solicitation
for applications. So, what is it advertising?
A “new kind of WARRIOR” Woman?
There are as many versions of the story of Pocahontas as there are representations of her in U.S. popular culture. It would be impossible
to sort through all of these images and the ensuing questions about
their factuality and significance here. Were she and John Smith in
love? Did she save Smith from her father? Why did Smith only write of
the scene in his draft of the Generall Historie of Virginie (1624) after
Pocahontas had gained notoriety in England as the famed “Indian
Princess”? Why did Pocahontas spend all of her time at the fort? Why
did she marry John Rolfe, convert to Christianity, change her name to
Rebecca, leave for England? Why was she returning home? (And, why
did Thomas Rolfe later lead U.S. troops against his mother’s people?)
All of these questions are very compelling and I do not mean to
minimize the importance of having them adequately addressed. In
fact, several scholars have pointed out the necessity of understanding
the historical and cultural context from which Pocahontas came and
that would have informed the political agendas and actions of her
Beyond Pocahontas
65
father, Powhatan, with regards to Smith and the colony. Indian
women have cared very deeply about what Pocahontas’s story tells us
about the history of Indian women’s roles generally and Pocahontas’s
role as a Powhatan woman specifically. Was the famed salvation scene
actually an enactment of a Powhatan adoption ceremony that would
have brought Smith under the authority of Powhatan? Is there a possibility that Pocahontas spent so much time at the fort because of an
estrangement from her own community following an alleged rape?
Was she spying for her father and carrying out an elaborate scheme to
obtain intelligence on the colonists and their plans?
My efforts are not to recover “the facts” in answer to the questions
engendered by Pocahontas and her story. Rather, I want to try to
understand how the narrative works. It is a different strategy that
cares about the way “the facts” are put to use rather than, say, deconstructing the plausibility of particular fact-claims in understanding
what histories still need to get told.
In “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in
American Culture,” Cherokee scholar Rayna Green suggests that the
persistence of Pocahontas’s story has been its utility within the mythic
structures of U.S. nationalism, particularly in (re)enacting the inferiority of Pocahontas’s culture and the dominion of Smith’s in what was to
be figured as America. Pocahontas’s alleged defiance of her father, her
choice to save Smith, her attention to Smith and the other colonists’
survival, her marriage and conversion, her Christian renaming, and
her move to England are all made evidence that she knew her own culture lacked the qualities valued by Smith’s and the New World
(Berkhofer 1979). In the end, Pocahontas is made to speak to that
New World, to that America, as heroine and ancestor. She is thereby
stripped of any vestiges of her own political agenda and her own cultural affiliation and identity.2
What is so insidious about the interpretative practices that transfigure Pocahontas into a quintessential American hero is the way such
inventions render her insignificant outside of her heterosexualized
relationships to men and how they erase her identity and affiliation as
a Powhatan. Dispossessing Pocahontas of her sovereign identity, culture, and history—and so the possibility for political concerns and
agendas other than those serving U.S. colonial men and interests—
makes it impossible to consider that she might have spoken for or to
other issues, such as those addressing her father’s powerful position,
her people’s autonomy and survival, and the treatment of Indians
by the colonists. Instead, Pocahontas becomes merely everybody’s
66
Joanne Barker
great-great grandmother, resolving conflicted problems of dispossession
and genocide that characterized her and her nation’s history with an
all too easy and hypocritical “affirmation of relationship” (Green
1990, 20).
Warrior Woman is more than coincidentally (in)formed by the
representational practices of Indian women’s figuring as icons of U.S.
nationalism. These practices are registered in the very moment that
Warrior Woman is both dispossessed from her own history, culture,
and identity and invites Indian people to identify with and emulate
that dispossession.
At the bottom of the ad, the Secret Service tells us that it “battles to
protect our nation’s leaders and financial systems”—“everyday,” no
less—and solicits applications from “young Americans with diverse
skills and backgrounds who are interested in a challenging career in
federal law enforcement.” This call for recruits is juxtaposed with the
text at the top of the ad which solicits “a new kind of WARRIOR.” But
what exactly does the ad mean by “new”?
Given the timing and location of its appearance, the ad anticipates
applications from recent high school and college graduates. The first
response to the ad, then, is to conflate the “new” with the “young”
American Indian students it seeks as applicants. I think a more purposeful reading is to understand the way that the “new” works in
junction with “diverse skills and backgrounds.” There, the ad implies
that there are Indian Warriors with culturally unique abilities and
understandings that could employ those “skills and backgrounds” to
the more “challenging” ends of the Secret Service. So, just what is
“new” about the Warrior the Secret Service is soliciting?
The feather-adorned spear is a generic ornament, a too-easy signifier for the warrior in the Warrior but without any of the stuff that
would mark it culturally relevant (indicating, e.g., that it is used in
fishing or in conflict or identifying which specific culture it is
employed within [not all Indian nation’s using spears of that kind,
etc.]). In other words, while the ad offers its recognition of the
“diverse skills and backgrounds” of Indian Warriors, it does not make
reference to any specific kind of culturally relevant skill or background
that Indian Warriors might have to offer or any specific kind of culturally defined Warrior, such as members of Lakota Warrior societies
or Cherokee “red town” councils. Neither does it make reference to
Indian Warriors who have already proven their service to other kinds
of acts of “federal law enforcement,” such as the Diné Code Talkers of
World War II or the thousands of Indian persons who are and have
Beyond Pocahontas
67
served in military and police forces throughout the United States
and around the world ever since (Nielsen and Silverman 1996).
Instead, the ad makes an Affirmative Action-sounding acknowledgment of the “diversity” of Indian “skills and backgrounds” in reference to the other kinds of warriors already in its legions.
Given the kind of nonexclusive reference to the relevance of Indian
cultural knowledge to the Secret Service, the “new” is more in concert
with the reference to the particular needs of the Secret Service in
its search for applicants. Since the ad specifically announces that it
“battles” “everyday” to protect U.S. national leaders and financial
systems from outside threat and corruption, perhaps it is asserting that
there is something about Indian Warrior’s “skills and backgrounds”
that would serve those ends in a “new” way. Perhaps the ad means to
suggest that what “diversity” the Indian Warrior could bring to the
Service is the skill and background in defending as opposed to threatening those leaders and systems. In its very celebration of this possibility, the adornment of the Indian Warrior with a spear implies that
this emblem is somehow a remnant of a past when the Indian Warrior
was successfully trained in fighting against the very U.S. military and
economic structures that the Service is now firmly situated within
maintaining. In other words, what would be “new” would be using
those skills and backgrounds in service to the United States. If this is
the case, then the Indian Warrior’s “skills and backgrounds” are being
understood as going unchallenged in the contemporary world of
Indian people. What is “new” is the opportunity the Secret Service
provides to Indian Warriors to remember and reemploy their otherwise seemingly outdated abilities in a challenging and meaningful way.
That the Indian Warrior is a woman is central to how the ad carries
out its signifying chain from the old to the new to the old again. The
Warrior Woman wants us to believe that what would be “new” is neither the idea of Indians in the Service nor of the relevancy of their
“skills and backgrounds” to the Secret Service but rather the very
notion that the Warrior would be a woman. The “new kind of
WARRIOR” is a Woman is the jingle that I believe the ad invites its audiences to sing. The Secret Service wants to foreground its acknowledgment of “diversity” by extending it from Indian to woman—from race
to gender—in one sweeping Affirmative Action gesture. It wants us to
believe that the Secret Service counters the often hypermasculinized
and racist notions of U.S. patriotism, particularly those associated
with the growing incidence of Euro-American militia activities in the
United States, with the very radical idea that the Secret Service already
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Joanne Barker
recognizes and reveres the qualities of heroic loyalty that Indian
women possess. In circuitry, of course, that quality is an invention of
the very U.S. nationalism on which the Secret Service stands.
The “new” erases a multitude of historical and cultural sins from
the pages of U.S. history that the ad so desperately wants to rewrite, or
rather, show that the Secret Service has already rewritten. Beginning
with the fact that Indians had to continually transform their “skills
and backgrounds” in order to defend themselves against U.S. military,
economic, and cultural aggression, that as anywhere from 60 to
95 percent of the Indian population in the United States died by disease and armed-conflict in the 1800s alone (Stiffarm and Lane 1992),
that Indian people have been systematically removed from their lands,
communities, beliefs, and languages in efforts to eradicate Indians
from everything Indian—and that U.S. national leaders and economic
systems have had an instrumental hand in directing and implementing
these policies in practice—is all shaken from the ad’s apparent affirmations of antiracism and antisexism like Indian–U.S. history were an
Etch-A-Sketch drawing that could be turned upside down and started
anew when the lines got too messy.
The Warrior Woman suggests that what is “new” about herself is
that a woman could be a warrior (like there weren’t ever any Indian
women warriors!) or that the service of Indian women as a whole in
the Secret Service has been unnoticed until now. But I believe that she
is fooling herself. That the Warrior is a Woman is as much a precondition of the erasure of the history of the role of U.S. national leaders
and economic systems in carrying out U.S. imperialism as it is a reconfiguration of it. The Warrior Woman simultaneously constructs an
Indian woman who is removed from her own histories and cultures as
a warrior for the Secret Service, as a detribalized Indian generically
adorned, as a deterritorialized warrior without a nation of her own
“to protect and to serve,” as she constructs those erasures to be lived
within. The cost of her ability to serve the secret intents of federal policy and economic intent is displaced from the very scene that celebrates the possibility of that service.
Enough Is Enough
In “Thoughts on Indian Feminism,” Assiniboine scholar Kathryn
Shanley argues that American Indian women have too often been
made into “tokens” for a “white feminist movement” which has
ignored the historical and cultural specificities of their own particular
Beyond Pocahontas
69
struggles and beliefs (Shanley 1984, 213–215). Shanley posits that the
concerns characteristic of the “white women’s movement” over the
economic and social oppression of the mainstream workforce and
“nuclear family” has little translation into contemporary Indian
women’s lives and concerns. For Shanley, sovereignty and cultural
autonomy are the basis for any reformulation or understanding of
Indian women’s epistemologies and politics, informing the range of
their activism with regard to environmental, resource, and land rights,
domestic violence, language retention, education, health care, and a
myriad of other issues.
Drawing from Shanley’s and other Native women’s works on the
politics of hermeneutics,3 I suggest that an oppositional reading strategy for the Warrior Woman ad would be to start from an understanding that Indian women are first and foremost situated within and
concerned about the struggles of their own unique nations for sovereignty and cultural autonomy as well as that of all indigenous people
in the Américas—North and South. This methodological perspective
takes sovereignty and cultural autonomy as the primary frames of reference for understanding the politics of representation for/of/about/by
American Indian women.
This is not to suggest that all Indian women have experienced histories of relocation, dispossession, and genocide in the same way, nor
that their ideas and goals about how to accomplish the repatriation of
their histories, cultures, and identities are the same. Rather, by insisting on sovereignty and autonomy as the primary frames of reference
for a hermeneutics of Indian women’s representations, the strategy
emphasizes the embeddedness of Indian histories, cultures, and identities in systems of meaning that are discrete and related. Issues of
national and cultural survivance, concepts of membership and belonging, and socially defined roles and political agendas provide the context from which to interpret representational practices of/by Indian
women (Kauanui 1999).
In the case of Pocahontas, this approach would fundamentally
impact not only understandings of her significance, but also the possibilities of her use as an iconographic reference for U.S. nationalism.
Her representational significance would be understood in the context
of how she has been made not only receptive to but solicitous of the
colonizing man/colonial project, continually being made over as giving
herself, her people, and her lands to him/it. Her role within her nation
as Powhatan’s daughter, what motives Powhatan and Pocahontas
might have had for her spending so much time with the colonists and
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Joanne Barker
marrying into their community, what kinds of cultural traditions
informed her seizure of the alleged execution attempt are all issues that
resituate the analysis of her representational significance within her
own historical and cultural experiences. The point would not be to
romanticize her as an antihero—maybe she was a sellout, maybe she
did give up, give in, but maybe not. (An analysis beyond the scope of
this essay but certainly worth fuller consideration.)
In the case of the Warrior Woman, insisting on sovereignty and
autonomy as the frames of reference impact the possibilities of reading
her significance. Unlike Pocahontas, Warrior Woman is not a historical figure per se. Believing that agency is something you do and not
something you are or are not given, I suggest that Warrior Woman’s
political and cultural agency is located within her self-determining
history, culture, and identity. The challenge, of course, is that the
image does not identify her Indian national affiliation; the codes provided
by the term “warrior” and the emblematic spear are far too tribally
generic as to be helpful. So, I’ll have to look elsewhere to enact the
reading.
In “Rosebuds of the Plateau,” Green suggests a story for the two
Indian women lounging on Japanese American photographer Frank
Matsura’s fainting couch (Two Girls on Couch 1910; Green 1992).
Though I would never presume to speak for Warrior Woman, I would
like to take my cue from Green and make up a story that might fill in
her confused dress, proud stance, and role in the Secret Service.
Because at some level I can not quite explain away, I like her. I am
transfixed by her. I am deeply troubled by her. From the moment that
I ran across this ad, I wanted to cut it out, frame it, hang it on the wall.
I mean, there she is with her matching polished nails and lipstick, her
MIB (WIB!) suit and silver adornments, her spear, and that wonderfully suggestive earpiece. I don’t know, maybe I’ve watched too much
of The X-Files, but I like this woman.
So, I have decided that the story I like best for her is that she is a
double agent. Perhaps I am informed by the readings of Pocahontas’s
role and historical significance that suggest her hanging out at the fort
and salvation of Smith from execution as part of some wider political
strategy by Powhatan to take in the colonists like he had taken in so
many Indian villages in the building of his empire. Or perhaps I am
informed by Joy Harjo’s remembrance in her collection of poetry,
In Mad Love and War, of Anna Mae Pictou Aquash, the Indian activist
assassinated in the 1970s by, most likely, people doing the bidding of
the FBI and then dismembered by the FBI for fingerprint identification
Beyond Pocahontas
71
(Mattiessen 1983; Churchill and Vander Wall 1988; Harjo 1990). Or
perhaps I am still waiting for that “great American novel” or weekly
TV drama starring an older Indian woman like Tantoo Cardinal as a PI
solving mystery after mystery without one tired old reference to Indian
tracking skills or night vision. In any case, the story I like best for
Warrior Woman is that she is a double agent—that the secret in her
service is that she is an informant to and not of federal law enforcement activities. How delicious is that?
From the seemingly endless reserve of data banks, filing cabinets,
and musty ill-numbered boxes in Pentagon basements and Nebraska
warehouses, Warrior Woman is passing on information to her people
that she has finally been made privy to after years of loyal and quiet
service. So loyal and quiet, in fact, that she is almost unnoticed.
Almost invisible. Even now. And who could doubt the likelihood of
that scenario? A woman too dark, too smart, too competent to be seen
by the sexist structures in which she works; appearing in conference
rooms and department meetings only on year-end personnel review
and employment statistic forms that get filed before they’re really
read; seen only as a satisfaction of a quotient for “race” and “gender”
diversity, as if that were what Affirmative Action was about.
So, she decides to take advantage of her invisibility—of her being
seen only as a statistic. Unbeknownst to any of her colleagues in one
of the world’s most infamous intelligence agencies, the dust-ridden
secrets hidden away in encryption codes and storehouses are brought
out of their hiding places and passed on to those who can decipher
their significance, break their codes, and unseal their overdue warnings for “confidentiality” and “national security” to assist them in
their struggles for sovereignty.
On the day that this picture was taken, Warrior Woman had scheduled a rendezvous with one of her contacts. She has discovered a password for www.treas.gov/treasury/bureaus/usss that allows the user to
enter all usss files at will and she is anxious to pass it on.
She has been well-placed at the front of the President’s caravan in a
parade for some misconstrued national holiday down NYC’s main
street—the perfect Kodak moment. She resisted carrying the spear,
arguing that it would get in the way if there were trouble, but her superior had had it specially dug out of a box of supplies in the oldest part
of a Nebraska warehouse. As she marches on through the heat, stopping occasionally to pose for pictures, she imagines the spear’s history.
She has decided that the spear was used in the special “citizenship
ceremonies” developed by Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane in
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Joanne Barker
1916. Lane had decided to make the delivery of land patents and the
commensurate status of U.S. citizenship under the provisions of the
General Allotment Act of 1887 a ceremonial event, probably because
he thought he knew how important rituals were to Indian people. In
the ceremony, Indians were to solemnly step out of a teepee and shoot
an arrow across an assembly in order to signify that they were leaving
their Indian way of life behind for the responsibilities of U.S. citizenship. (Possibly the presiding official, for those tribes who did not use
bows and arrows, carried around a supply like so many Edward
Curtis props. On one day, perhaps, his supply got left behind and
the Indians had to use their own spears, confiscated by the agent in the
confusion that followed. So that, instead of shooting an arrow, the
Indians had to fling their spears across center stage. I am sure, at any
rate, that it could have happened that way.)
Moving slowly away from their teepees, the Indians were supposed
to place their hands on a plow to demonstrate that they had chosen the
responsibilities and demands of a farming, tax-paying life. The reasoning was that by being given their allotment and citizenship, they
would have to earn a living for their families by “making use” of the
lands that they were being “given.” With hands on plow, Indians were
handed a purse by the presiding official to remind them to save what
they earned that they might fulfill their new responsibilities. At the
close of the ceremony, the Indians were presented with an American
flag and directed to repeat the following phrase: “Forasmuch as the
President has said that I am worthy to be a citizen of the United States,
I now promise this flag that I will give my hands, my head, and my
heart to the doing of all that will make me a true American citizen”
(McDonnell 1991, 95).
To conclude the ceremony, the presiding official pinned a badge
decorated with an American eagle and the national colors on the recipient to remind the Indian to act in a way that would honor the flag and
the privileges of U.S. citizenship that had been afforded to him/her that
day. (These ceremonies were first performed on the Yankton reservation in South Dakota in 1916, and were conducted by Lane himself
[McDonnell 1991, 95–96].)
As Warrior Woman carried the spear down Main Street, she wondered about those that participated in the citizenship ceremonies. She
is sure that many of them went through the ceremony half-heartedly,
even mockingly, but that probably many more were interpellated into
the life it enacted (Althusser 1971). Participation didn’t have to mean
compliance but it would be hard for a spectator to tell the difference.
Beyond Pocahontas
73
Like those who watched her march down Main Street like an emblem
of the President’s Affirmative Action prowess, like a symbol of Secret
Service loyalty and patriotism, they would probably believe her a modern day Pocahontas—a hero, a traitor, depending. They wouldn’t know
that she had switched the frequency of her radio over to a station playing Buffy St. Marie’s “The Universal Soldier.” That she had flipped
over the pin on her lapel so that the flag was upside-down. That she
was waiting for her contact to bump into her through the crowds so
that she could pass on the small notepad hiding in her left coat pocket
with a secret password scribbled on it to provide access to the mysteries of the Secret Service. But that’s all okay, she thought. She knew.
When All Things Old Are New Again . . .
American Indian women, while sharing experiences with other “women
of color” in the context of ongoing histories of U.S. nationalism, are not
another “ethnicity” in the rainbow of American cultural difference. For
identifying as Indian is not quite the same thing as identifying, for
instance, as “Black” or “Chinese-American.” To identify or mark indigeneity is to claim oneself as a member of a people—a “collective nonstate entity” (Wilmer 1993, 164)—with internationally recognized legal
rights to political and cultural sovereignty and autonomy. This is why so
many Indian people insist on their national or tribal identities in opposition to being identified as Indian. In fact, the very processes of racialization of Indian people in the United States as Indians has been an integral
part of the political processes that have sought to undermine Indian sovereignty and autonomy. To the extent that Indians have been counted
as “minorities,” “under-represented,” and/or as making up an “ethnic
group” within the larger U.S. polity, the notion that they are citizens of
their own unique nations has been undermined, displaced. This has
important and immediate consequences to self-government, land and
resource rights, juridical autonomy, and cultural survivance. In other
words, the ethnicization of Indians and the representational practices
that employ it have been extremely useful in the systematic negation of
Indian people’s sovereignty and autonomy (Barker 1995, 2000).
Of course, issues of dual citizenship and the more slippery concepts
of membership and belonging for mixed-race and mixed-tribal Indians
complicates matters even further. There are Indians who want to be
recognized as U.S. citizens and consider themselves patriots; there are
those who have not recognized themselves as citizens of Indian nations
at all; and, there are those who believe themselves to be citizens of two
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Joanne Barker
countries. Further, the identities and memberships of “mixedbloods”—those of mixed racial and/or mixed tribal descent—make it
impossible to render a simple notion of what it means to identify or be
identified as Indian within the context of representational practices. I
do not mean to dismiss these complexities but rather to suggest that
for Indian people in the United States the erasure of the sovereign from
the Indian has been a particularly strategic goal of dispossession, genocide, and assimilation. This goal is encapsulated by the Warrior
Woman: denationalized, detribalized, an emblem of diversity within
the “our” of U.S. politics and economics.
The issues that Warrior Woman embodies are foregrounded by the
way the ad sets up a tension between the hegemonic knowledge practices
of U.S. nationalism and the oppositional strategies of American Indian
women. It is not a natural tension. It is very much a construction of the
kinds of power imagined within colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchalism. Pocahontas as an historical figure is enigmatic of these troubles,
her dispossession and death the precondition of her usefulness in maintaining the mythic structures of U.S. nationalist discourses. Warrior
Woman indicates that these troubles have been carried forward in the
continued possibilities for making Indians speak to/for the very political
and economic agendas that have undermined their struggles for sovereignty and autonomy. It follows that the precondition of her service is the
simultaneous erasure of her own unique history, culture, and identity and
the erasure of the diversity of Indian histories, cultures, and identities in
the Americas. I have tried to show how it might be otherwise.
Acknowledgments
I am indebted to Jennifer Gonzales, Valerie Soe, and Theresa Harlan for their feedback on the version of this essay that I presented at the 1999 workshop. I would
also like to acknowledge the original editorial board of Beyond the Frame—
Victoria Banales, Luz Calvo, Ceclia Cruz, J. Kehaulani Kauanui, and Keta
Miranda—who conceived of and directed the project as well as the members of the
Women of Color in Collaboration and Conflict Research Cluster at UC Santa Cruz
who planned the workshop. A warm thank you to Luana Ross for providing me
with a copy of the ad in color.
Notes
Previously published as “Looking for Warrior Woman (Beyond Pocahontas)” in
This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation. AnaLouise
Keating and Gloria Anzaldúa, eds. (New York: Routledge Press, 2002).
Beyond Pocahontas
75
1. See inserts, News From Indian Country (XII:11 June 1998: 9A) and Indian
Country Today (June 8–15, 1998: B8). Apparently, the Secret Service is one of
the main subscribers to NFIC and ICT (according to an editor with ICT).
2. As Green shows in “The Pocahontas Perplex,” the image of Pocahontas
is troubled further by her twin, the squaw/whore, who shares her onedimensional referentiality to colonial men and colonial processes.
3. See also Patricia Monture-Angus’ Thunder in My Soul: A Mohawk Woman
Speaks (1995) and Lee Maracle’s I am Woman: A Native Perspective on
Sociology and Feminism (1996).
References
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and
Philosophy and Other Essays. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971,
127–188.
Barker, Joanne. “Indian Made.” Qualifying Essay. History of Consciousness.
University of California, Santa Cruz, 1995.
———. “IndianTM U.S.A.” Wicazo Sa Review: A Native American Studies Journal
[University of Minnesota Press] 18:1 (Spring 2003).
Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations.” In Selected Writings. Mark Poster,
ed. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988, 166–184.
Berkhofer, Robert F. Berkhofer, The White Man’s Indian: Images of the American
Indian from Columbus to the Present. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Churchill, Ward and Jim Vander Wall. Agents of Repression: The FBI’s Secret Wars
Against the Black Panther Party and the American Indian Movement. Boston,
MA: South End Press, 1988.
Green, Rayna. “Rosebuds of the Plateau: Frank Matsura and the Fainting
Couch Aesthetic.” In Partial Recall: With Essays On Photographs of Native
North Americans. Lucy R. Lippard, ed. New York: The New Press, 1992,
47–53.
———. “The Pocahontas Perplex: The Image of Indian Women in American
Culture.” In Unequal Sisters: A Multicultural Reader in U.S. Women’s History.
Ellen Carol DuBois and Vicki L. Ruiz, eds. NY: Routledge, 1990, 15–21.
Harjo, Joy In Mad Love and War. Hanover, New England: Wesleyan University
Press, 1990.
Kauanui, J. Kehaulani. “A Fraction of National Belonging: Anatomy of One
‘Hybrid Hawaiian’ in 1930s Racial Classificatory Schema.” In this volume.
Maracle, Lee. I Am Woman: A Native Perspective on Sociology and Feminism.
New York: Press Gang Publishers, 1996.
Monture-Angus, Patricia. Thunder In My Soul: A Mohawk Woman Speaks. Nova
Scotia: Fernwood Publishing, 1995.
Mattiessen, Peter. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. New York: Viking Press, 1983.
McDonnell, Janet A. The Dispossession of the American Indian 1887–1934.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
Nielson, Marianne O. and Robert A. Silverman, eds. Native Americans, Crime,
and Justice. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1996.
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Rich, Adrienne Rich. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.”
Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 5:4 (1980), 631–660.
Rountree, Helen C. “Pocahontas’s People” The Powhatan Indians of Virginia
Through Four Centuries. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1990.
Shanley, Kathryn. “Thoughts on Indian Feminism.” In A Gathering of Spirit: A
Collection by North American Indian Women. Beth Brant, ed. Ithaca, NY:
Firebrand Books, 1984, 213–215.
Stiffarm, Lenore A. and Phil Lane, Jr., “The Demography of Native North
America: A Question of Indian Survival.” In The State of Native America:
Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance. M. Annette Jaimes, ed. Boston, MA:
South End Press, 1992, 23–54.
Wilmer, Franke. The Indigenous Voice in World Politics. Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Publications, 1993.
5
“Come Up to the Kool Taste”: Race and
the Semiotics of Smoking
Sarah S. Jain
Although most often paired with alcohol in policy and culture debates,
tobacco more readily compares to sugar or coffee in its ubiquitous and
continual availability (and until recently, acceptability) to all classes. The
intimate pleasures of the cigarette—from the flip-top box to the perfected flick of an ash or the excuse to ask a stranger for a light—should
not be understated. The cigarette and the social rituals it has motivated
made it truly iconic of popular culture through the mid-twentieth century. Consider, for example, its adaptability: readily slipped into a pocket
or behind an ear, a means to a private or a social moment, a lift or a sedative. The cigarette acts as a snack, prop, drug, or coping mechanism. The
cheapness and efficiency with which it satisfies, and the only short-lived
gratification it bestows, the cigarette takes the commodity to its most
refined, profitable, and complete incarnation. While consumed nearly
completely, literally disappearing into a puff of smoke (the butt easily disposed of under a shoe), the cigarette’s solitary blemish lies in the fact that,
over time, the cumulative effect of its debris slowly and irrevocably sickens and kills its consuming host, preventing it from procuring anew.
In the legal framing of capitalism in the United States, this one flaw
should have been enough to have the cigarette—as a manufactured,
designed, advertised, and sold product—not only regulated, but banned
outright. Despite its vicissitudes and varied theories, product liability
law has arisen in the United States as the infrastructure through which
Americans can claim their right not to be injured by the products that
they buy and use as intended. But only recently have people been able
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Sarah S. Jain
to consider themselves injured in a legal sense by cigarettes, as a third
wave of lawsuits has made claims against tobacco corporations ranging from false advertising and defective design to knowingly selling an
addictive product. One of the most interesting of these recent suits was
an attempt to highlight the economic racism of cigarette marketing
through a Civil Rights claim. Brought in Pennsylvania in 1998 on
behalf of Black smokers by the Reverend Jesse Brown, it raised the
issue of niche marketing, discrimination, and the “staggering loss of
life, premature disability, disease, illness, and economic loss” resulting
from “the Tobacco Companies’ intentional and racially discriminating
fraudulent course of misconduct.”1
The Brown complaint had many aspects, but it basically contended
“that Defendants have for many years targeted African Americans and
their communities with specific advertising to lure them into using
mentholated tobacco products . . .”2 As a result of the increased
danger of mentholated cigarettes and “a conspiracy of deception and
misrepresentation against the African American public,” it argued that
African Americans have disproportionately suffered the injury, disability, and death that invariably follow from smoking menthols. In
arguing the enhanced dangers of menthols (both menthol as an ingredient as well as other design factors—such as tobacco engineered for
increased nicotine content—that have attended mentholated cigarettes),
Brown pointed out that first, menthol contains carcinogenic compounds such as benzopyrene. Second, mentholated cigarettes contain
higher nicotine and “tar” levels than non-mentholated versions.
Third, menthol encourages deeper and longer inhalation of tobacco
smoke. Menthols account for between 60 percent and 75 percent of
cigarettes smoked by African Americans, and thus puts these smokers
under increased risks.3
The fact that this suit was brought under the Civil Rights Act of
1866 provides a radical departure from products liability approaches
to legal retribution for defective products. By claiming transgression of
the Civil Rights Act, originally written to protect recently freed slaves
from a variety of discriminatory practices, the complainants of the
Brown class action suit sought to show the unconstitutionality of
targeting African Americans with defective products. This strategy
sidestepped the problematic way in which product liability law seeks to
reestablish the status quo through compensation (and thus tends to
under-compensate women and minorities) as well as address the structural issue of race targeting by attempting to have advertising directed
toward African Americans banned. But complainants had to assert
their claims very narrowly. For example, under section 1982, they
Race and the Semiotics of Smoking
79
needed to show intentional discrimination on the part of the defendants
that would impair the plaintiff’s ability to “make contractual arrangements for the sale and purchase of tobacco products.” The court, in
dismissing Brown, set aside the issue of targeting because plaintiffs
were unable to show that they were offered less favorable contractual
terms than Whites were. Essentially, the court noted that plaintiffs were
free to buy any type of cigarettes, and the mentholated products that
many did smoke were “just as defective and dangerous as the mentholated products” that were sold to Whites with equal terms of sale.4
Thus Brown was dismissed by a federal District Court in 1999 on a set
of narrow but important legal grounds, and the key charges of targeting a dangerous product were not considered by the court.
Nevertheless, the case—as one in a series of attempts by various
groups to mobilize against extreme cultural and economic target
marketing—raises sets of crucial issues both about the ways in which
individuals and communities are socially and physically constituted by
products and consumption decisions and about the place of rights in consumer culture. Despite the issues of targeting, racism, and consumption
raised by Brown, the significant media attention it garnered tended to fissure along the same lines as a product liability case would. One view,
seemingly allied with tobacco corporations, claimed that African
Americans are as capable of making choices as anyone—and everyone
makes choices they regret. The other view consolidated generally around
the position that tobacco corporations have behaved reprehensibly, and
unquestionably should be held responsible for resulting injuries. In neither of these sides are African Americans portrayed as naïve dupes or
hapless victims, but rather, each carries assumptions about human, nonhuman, and institutional accountability. Elaine Scarry would frame this
problem in the terms of “object-responsibility”: manufacturers ought to
ensure that their products embody a “material registration of the
awareness” of end users.5 Given adequate product design human users
will be able to make responsible choices.
Framing the issue of defective products as one of Civil Rights rather
than product liability forces an added dimension to assumptions about
reasonable products and reasonable users: Should the product, and its
manufacturers, have “known” that it would be more appealing and
more lethal to a specific disenfranchised group of Americans, or did it
truly offer itself to all takers on an equal basis? Where do economics
and culture intersect in this question? Through these questions, the
mentholated cigarette and the Brown case offer a view into the broader
framework of capitalism and the always already unequal terms of
consumption. Here I investigate this by situating cigarette target
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marketing within the context of a developing African American
consumerism, and then, in the second part of the paper, to the particular way that mentholated cigarettes were paired with African American
smokers.
This essay, as a small part of a book project investigating the politics of social and physical injury, focuses on a short but crucial period
of smoking history: the 1950s and 1960s. Several reasons collude to
make this a period of key importance. Legal suits necessarily spotlight
this era, as people who began smoking before health warnings on
packages and advertisements appeared have met considerably more
success in soliciting the empathy of jurors. Furthermore, African
Americans were “discovered,” or constituted, as a market, represented
in various ways, and targeted in uniquely new ways for a slew of new
products. Cigarette companies had led target market campaigns since
the early century, and, already well aware of the dangers of their product, used marketing with particular abandon. This requires investigation,
since the fact that Brown and Williamson (B&W) advertised proportionately more to Blacks than Whites throughout the 1960s (while
10 percent of the population is Black, B&W spent 17 percent of Kool’s
advertising budget on “black advertising”6) does not build a strong
case for the significance of targeting Blacks during the 1960s, though
this statistic was strongly claimed in the Brown suit. I suggest that
other factors contributed to the sway of this campaign.7
Marketing in the 1950s and 1960s also coincided with the Civil
Rights movement and boycotts protesting discrimination in hiring
practices as well as the later generational and philosophical rifts in the
goals for the movement. During this period, as Michael Omi and
Howard Winant argue, the “black movement redefined the meaning of
racial identity, and consequently of race itself, in American society.”8
With an analysis of the ways that “race” circulated and was contested
during this period my hope is to come to a clearer understanding of
how the Brown suit throws into relief the poverty of our ways of
thinking about physical injury, and in particular the slippery links
between physical and social injuries and their categorization—and
furthermore, their relations to consumption more generally. Finally,
the number of Black smokers increased dramatically during this 20-year
period, and smoking by everyone was at its twentieth-century peak:
52.5 percent of Americans were smokers by 1966.9
As good a place as any to start this story is the August 1967 special
issue of Ebony. In this issue, publisher and founding editor, John H.
Johnson, explores “the challenging and bewilderingly complex world of
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the more than eleven million Negroes who are below the age of twentyfive.”10 Although Johnson stresses his concern about youth and their
identity crises, the issue is also about Civil Rights, featuring articles on
activist movements, the dearth of educational opportunities, Jessie
Jackson (whom Johnson claims as a close friend) on economics, unemployment, Vietnam, as well as a proto-feminist piece on the successes of
an Iowa coed pool player. As befits the predominant readership of the
magazine, the preponderance of its advertisements are woman-oriented.
This content generally fits into the human interest, celebrity, bootstrap
rubric under which Johnson had founded Ebony. While in the early- to
mid-1960s Ebony readers were better educated, held more whitecollar jobs, had a much higher mean income, and were 10 years older
than the general Black population, 31 percent of readers earned an
annual income of less than $5,000 and 41 percent did not complete
high school.11 Through the 1960s the magazine covered Civil Rights
issues, though its coverage waned as the movement became increasingly
radical. By the late 1960s the magazine reverted again to a self-help
rather than protest orientation.12
Looking back to August 1967, one notes that unlike the women
featured by the magazine’s articles who stand in lines, have meetings, and
work day jobs, the advertisements parade the summer of 1967 as one
filled with women overcome with ecstasy over sporting tampax, visiting the manicurist, procuring straight hair, quaffing Pepsi, lathering
down in the shower, and ironing clothes while a child bangs pot-lids
(thanks to Bayer aspirin’s cure for his mother’s resulting headache).
In the midst of the confusion and crisis of identity and youth and
fervent women, one turns from the front cover of Ebony, on which is
pictured a wildly graffitied broken-down brick wall, “Negro Youth in
America Anxious Angry and Aware,” to find an invitation to “Come
up to the KOOL Taste.” The moment of calm on the cover’s flip-side
transports the reader to a stream babbling through a woody area as
the blurred background to a couple relaxing on a quixotic wooden
bridge. Although the couple seem to be about the same age as the
“youth” featured in the magazine, they are certainly of a different
generation (see figure 5.1).
In this formally dressed down leisurely pose in the woods, the
woman in her kool turquoise-green mint dress with matching shoes
and bracelet seems to emerge, genie-like, from the box of cigarettes.
Even the twist of her body highlighted by the folds of her frock echoes
the magical children’s story version of Aladdin, who emerges from a
genie lamp in a curl of smoke. But if this is so, it is the only suggestion
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Sarah S. Jain
Figure 5.1 Cover (L) and Inside Cover of Ebony, August 1967.
of smoke, for these white-toothed nonsmokers do not even have their
cigarettes lit. The couple is confidently heterosexual, overlapping if
not touching—he, dark and handsome and she straight-haired and
gorgeous, while a wedding ring is conspicuously absent. Perhaps they
are courting; they are certainly wealthy and upwardly mobile. These
charming people wait, curiously, invitingly, genuinely, for some sign
from the observer, and the cigarette box below reflects this offer. The
invitation of this scene is as unabashed as the class and assimilationist
aspirations. If the appellation “KOOL” plays on a real or imagined
Black vernacular, the enticement is to a middle class. The Kool brand
was hailed by Advertising Age as a success for its call to upward
mobility and the well-dressed couple in an outdoors scene was
reflected in the advertisements for Newport and Salem menthols
throughout the mid- to late-1960s menthols.13
Though marginally interesting in its details, this ad promises a prosaic menu of success, achievement, and pleasure—the standard fare of
advertisers everywhere. Nevertheless, it is emblazoned with the struggles of Ebony founder and editor-in-chief, John H. Johnson. Johnson’s
1989 autobiography, Succeeding Against the Odds, is one diffracted
through the lens of a foundational belief in equal opportunity capitalism. Born in 1918, Johnson completed the eighth grade twice, the last
83
grade available to Blacks in Arkansas, while his mother earned the
money to move with her son and daughter to Chicago so that he could
attend high school. Johnson epitomizes the American Dream, and his
autobiography is largely a story of overcoming, though perhaps not as
much as he would have liked. He writes, “if I hadn’t operated with the
handicap of racial barriers, I could have made billions, instead of
millions.”14 To be sure, compelling evidence buoys this observation.
Johnson’s initial success with Negro Digest (1942), initiated with a
$500 loan that used his mother’s furniture as collateral, led him to
found Ebony (1945), Tan (1950), and Jet (1951). Ebony’s first issue,
launched with nary a subscriber as an oversized monthly of “Negro
news and pictures,” had by 1966 reached a circulation of close to a
million.15 One of Johnson’s main obstacles, after having overcome
so many to have Ebony published at all, was to find advertisers for the
magazine. Even after it reached a staggering circulation of 400,000,
Johnson struggled against racism in his efforts to gain advertisers;
Johnson wanted “the big four color ads that were the staple of white
magazines” rather than the inferior black and white small-scale ads
typical of Black publications.16 Johnson shares several anecdotes in his
autobiography—in a paternal “you can too” guise—of how he was
able to reach the offices of a significant number of CEOs and finally
convince them to advertise.
One of his broader-range strategies involved a two-pronged operation
to convince White corporations of the size and profitability of the
Negro market, and ultimately, to teach them how to coddle this market. Publishing in the early 1950s, Johnson spearheaded a burgeoning
industry of market consultants involved in a similar venture.17
Johnson’s goal was clear: “To increase the profits of corporate
America and, incidentally, the profits of Johnson Publishing Company,
we have to change the perceptions of corporate America.”18 By 1967
Ebony had the lion’s share of the annual $8 million spent on Blackoriented magazine advertising.19
The strength of the African American market and the community’s
positive response to respect in advertising had been demonstrated as
early as the mid-1930s. Kellogg Company was among the first U.S.
food corporations to pursue this market by broadly advertising
Cornflakes in a non-derogatory manner in the Black press.20 This invitation to consume must have been powerfully evident. Grace Elizabeth
Hale shows, for example, how in that period southern segregation
enforced systems of consumption that involved violently suppressing
the “uppity” Negro who emulated the White middle class and selling
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only poor quality goods to Blacks. Thus, even wealthy Blacks could
not access goods and other signifiers of class, and when they could,
they found that the symbols of oppression went far beyond second
class service and goods. They were met at the county store with not
only staggeringly racist advertising and product labels but sales counters that sold souvenirs of the latest lynching—including postcards and
Black fingers and toes. As they became available though, brand name
products were relied on by northern and southern Blacks to avoid discriminations such as short weights and poor quality goods. Similarly,
the growth of supermarkets and standardized services saved the Black
shopper from continually being bumped to the back of the line.21
Nevertheless, the egregiously elementary tutorials offered by Johnson
and others reflected advertisers’ continued racism: “Don’t exaggerate
Negro characters, with flat noses, thick lips, kinky hair, and owl eyes . . .
Always avoid the word ‘Pickaninny,’ or lampooning illustrations of
Negro children. They are as dear to their parents as are other children,
irrespective of race.”22 The secondary effects of racism needed pointing
out: “Don’t set up contest prizes that a Negro winner could not enjoy,
such as a free trip to Miami Beach, or a new suburban house in an area
where the Negro might not want to live.”23 Changing the perceptions
of corporate America meant refiguring popular representations of race
in the media.
As the White market represented more than 10 times that of the
African American market, many corporations claimed that integration
in advertising may offend a large portion of White consumers. African
American market advisors took several tacks against this fear. They
began by noting the sheer size of the market. By the mid-1960s, the
advertising community generally concurred that “Negroes, as a group,
represent a purchasing power of around $20 billion, approximately as
large as the markets of Belgium, Sweden, Denmark, and Norway
combined.”24 Size by population was not in itself the crucial factor, so
self-conscious attempts were made to diminish the notion that African
Americans were poor. Johnson, for example, commissioned a survey
on the brand preferences of Black families to discredit the “general
assumption that this is simply a market for low cost goods.”25
Other advisors tried to put a positive spin on the particular experiences of African Americans. One claimed that hired domestics “exert
a direct influence on the purchase of several commodities in the
home”26 Johnson focused on the fact that they had “become acquainted
with expensive merchandise through working with wealthy White
people—as butlers, valets, maids, housekeepers. . . .”27 Racism
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provided for other marketing opportunities as well: since African
Americans had far less opportunity for recreation and housing, it was
argued that they tended to spend their money on commodities, thus
matching and exceeding White disposable income in several categories. The categories that were most often mentioned had to do with
looks and “prestige items,” such as scotch. This example illustrates a
point that is not uncommon in the literature of this period: “The
Negro . . . will spend much more money on food, clothing, appliances,
automobiles, and other items in order to help overcome his insecurity
neurosis. The result has been that Negro standards of living in many
categories of goods are a match to white standards.”28 The “insecurity
neurosis” and “inferiority complexes”29 that African Americans purportedly suffered provided an opportunity for advertisers to offer
what Jackson Lears has since called the “therapeutic ethos” of
consumption.30
Other consultants studied the ways that race exceeded the problems
of class and the accessibility of products. For example, African
American sociologist Henry Allen Bullock’s 1961 two-part study in
the Harvard Business Review was based on a survey of nearly 2,000
people, and in-depth interviews with a further 300. Bullock’s most
interesting data have to do with Blacks’ and Whites’ approaches to
consumer choices, which detail varying moral codes of consumption.
In the first category, consider the example of credit, the use of which
Black people “felt obliged to display an elaborate system of rationalization” to justify. For Whites, credit tended to be used more liberally
for products that they wanted, rather than what they “needed.”31
Overall Whites tended to be more accepting, and even envious of
higher consumption levels, whereas Blacks held a more traditionally
protestant view of consumption above and beyond financial liberty. In
considering air conditioners, for example, a White person said, “They
[owners] are spoiled, but I think it’s wonderful. I wish I could afford
to do it.”32 African Americans tended to feel that air conditioning was
an unnecessary luxury. These examples indicate a different approach
to class privilege and consumerism that goes beyond a simple ability to
buy more; they indicate the ways in which class transformation also
required a resocialization about consumption and entitlement.33 This
ambivalence between race and class in consumer decisions was also
noted slightly differently by Dave Berkman in his 1963 study of advertising in Ebony and Life. He concluded that, what the Black man
“does want is to be a middle-class Negro; but for right now, and for as
long as the two are, to a large degree, essentially contradictions in
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terms, he will find most appealing those items whose consumption
most clearly say ‘white’—but only because they also say ‘middleclass.’ ”34Freedom in consumption might by seen as a way out of the
restrictions of segregation.
Many of the market consultants genuinely believed in the integrity
of their work. One 1961 article claims, “Children, for example, do
hear and learn the advertising message. They, too, are destinators [sic].
What kind of people they become is determined, at least in part, by the
tonal quality of the advertisers’ message. When sellers turn communicators, they inevitably become educators.”35 Another African
American consultant wrote, “As the Negro becomes freer, he becomes
more race conscious. There would be no Negro market in the United
States if it weren’t for the racial tension.”36 This evidence suggests that
consultants believed that the eradication of racism in marketing and
advertising would offer a clear path away from the vicious racism of
the early century.
The work of African American marketers, however, was not universally celebrated as progressive. Sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, for
example, cited statistics in his 1957 study of the “black bourgeoisie”
indicating that by 1938 Blacks already spent about 90 percent of their
incomes in White owned businesses.37 Frazier wrote that, “The myth
that Negroes were spending $15 billion in 1951 [nearly 3-times what
could be demonstrated using available statistics] was widely circulated
by Whites as well as Negroes in the United States and whet the
appetites of the Black bourgeoisie, both Negro businessmen and
Negroes employed by American corporations in their efforts to reap
benefits from the increased earnings of Negroes.”38 Indeed, Sponsor
reported, “The growing awareness that understanding is the key to
effective advertising has created a boom for 15 or 20 Negro public
relations firms. Billings for D. Parke Gibson, for example, are up
40 percent over a year ago. . . .”39 Thus, it is not at all clear that target
marketing brought overall more money to White companies, though it
seemed to provide [limited] job opportunities for Black consultants
and magazine editors. Frazier argues that this misrepresentation of
the size of the market served a tripartite purpose. First, it gave an
exaggerated sense of worth to bourgeois Blacks; second, it strengthened the false notion that the accumulation of wealth could solve
African Americans’ problems; and third, it posed that integration was
a possibility for African Americans (an idea he disagreed with).
Though later in the 1960s Civil Rights strategies became more
radical, early Civil Rights activists employed boycotts against White
87
corporations. But for African Americans with stakes in these companies, boycotts were perilous. Therefore, Johnson outspokenly opposed
a Christmas boycott that had been suggested by James Baldwin, Louis
Lomax, and Ossie Davis in the wake of the 1963 Birmingham church
bombing.40 But several marketing campaigns addressed these boycotts. One article, describing Black women’s purchasing habits,
reports: “Further, she is militant in her pursuit of economic and civil
rights, and will cross off her shopping list the name of any company
she believes or suspects practices discrimination.”41 By 1964 when this
article had appeared, companies had ample opportunity to experience
the effects of boycotts; the previous year Advertising Age had puzzled
over the fine line among placating, fearing, and bribing angry Black
boycotters.42
At least to some extent, advertising to Blacks was understood, even
as it targeted race, in relation to desegregation. It would not be impossible to suggest that some corporations were willing to capitulate, at
least rhetorically, to some civil rights demands. After the lunch counter
boycotts in 1963, for example, Woolworth’s decided to “really get a
very strong, positive program—one which includes employment opportunities and perhaps scholarships—to overcome the bad reputation it
acquired.”43 Other corporations, such as Greyhound, acted on African
American marketing advice and installed a “total marketing” approach
that included hiring Black executives and drivers, and picturing
Whites and Blacks seated together in commercials.44 On the other
hand, companies were also quick to co-opt Black culture—by making
short films depicting “the Negro in education, entertainment, agriculture, national affairs, and medicine,” for example, and illustrating ads
with cultural icons such as jazz bands, sports idols and Civil Rights
activists. One Advertising Age article describes a contemporary
Liggett and Myers campaign to its overwhelmingly White readership:
“ ‘Super bad’ actually means especially good or super excellent in the
current black lexicon.”45
Cigarette companies were on the leading edge of post–World War II
segmented marketing; one of the four first advertisements that graced
the pages of Ebony in 1947 was for Chesterfield cigarettes. They had
already been advertising in target presses to Jews and Germans in the
early century, and starting in the early 1950s featured Black models in
Black magazines and White models in White magazines, often with the
same copy. Quantitative evidence has suggested that targeted cigarette
advertising has “worked,”46 while tobacco documents have linked the
high sales of Kools in the 1960s to the nicotine and sugar content of
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the cigarette. Perhaps for both those reasons and others, the percentage of smoking African Americans increased significantly between
1955 and the mid-1960s.47
The rise of the lifestyle magazine as a form of popular culture
post–World War I also fomented a consolidation of a middle class.48
The uneasy position of all people identified as and with Black
Americans in the middle class is clear as the Ebony reader in August
1967 turned from the cover image of the graffitied wall to the Kool
advertisement on its backside. The cover hints at the violence of the
era. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, who surely frightened Black
conservatives—readers of Ebony—as much as Whites, had been shot.
The Black Panthers and other political groups were being infiltrated
by the FBI as young Black men were being drafted for Vietnam.
Perhaps readers of Ebony, having grown up in the era of Jim Crow
when “talking back” could be a capital crime, were terrified for
children who had tired of what they saw as their parents’ inaction.49
The Kool advertisement offered other fantasies, ones based in the history
of a Civil Rights movement that had used law to open new possibilities in education and employment. In this way the ad reflects not only
Johnson’s own struggles, but the way that they exemplified a long tradition of Black conservatism, whose roots in Booker T. Washington’s
reliance on hard work and self-improvement found voice through
twentieth-century women’s clubs, Black churches, and appeals to the
Supreme Court.50 The magazine’s readership and the products advertised
in Ebony were reflected in each other. Professor and activist Angela Y.
Davis, for example, smoked unfiltered Pall Malls in the mid-1960s
rather than mentholated cigarettes precisely because of the sorts of
middle-class assimilationist African American identity that attended
the menthol image.51
If the ambivalence evoked by the magazine was one of class and
aspiration, it also needs contextualization against the direct information management strategies of tobacco corporations. It is no secret
that tobacco companies have been tireless in their tentacular struggle
to erase tobacco’s traces. For example, the advertisement-free Reader’s
Digest, the nation’s then largest circulating magazine, had published
the first widely read popular article on the health effects of smoking in
1952, bringing information of the health risks that had long been
known in medical communities to the general public.52 In 1957
American Tobacco’s public relations employee J. T. Ross pressured its
own and Reader’s Digest’s ad agency—Batten, Barton, Durstine &
Osborn—to drop the magazine’s advertising account. Since American
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Tobacco billed about $30 million annually, compared to Reader’s
Digest’s $2 million, the agency dropped Reader’s Digest.53 This small
example stands in here for hundreds of such cases where tobacco
corporations have stultified the press by any means necessary. Ebony
magazine has received a steady 10 percent of its ad revenue from
cigarettes since 1947 and as many as one in three color advertisements
in some issues is for cigarettes. Studies find that “in its more than
40-year history, it has never published a major article on the leading
cause of death among Black Americans: tobacco.”54 The cigarette and
its effects joined in the making of culture not only through its hastening of the deaths of various cultural producers (and arguably through
the increased production-effect of nicotine) and through the changed
economies spurred by the industry, but also through the assurance of
strategic ignorances in the population at large, a point to which I shall
return in the next section.
Thus, while it may be true, as Thomas Laqueur argues, that
“Addiction is not only an attachment to a substance, it is also an
attachment to a passion of great spiritual and cultural thickness,”55
one must be wary to historicize the terms of that cultural thickness.
Discrimination pervaded the rise of U.S. consumerism in the 1950s
and 1960s. Key tensions arise in this period of intensifying popular
and corporate activity in the ways that the most prominent images in
American culture—advertisements—were finally including groups of
minority people in seemingly respectful ways. These embodied promises of the contemporary Civil Rights struggles—for education, jobs,
and housing—not only through the fantasies that they portrayed, but
also through the economic channels of supporting African American
market consultants, publishers, magazines, models, and writers. As
many of the civil legal and regulatory promises were thwarted, the
stakes in systematic racism for cigarette companies were few. Thus,
cigarette companies (unlike housing developers56) were free to interpellate people of any race, class, gender without fearing the loss of
their other customers. This liberty enabled them to ally themselves
with any cause—from Civil Rights to Billie Jean King’s demand for an
equal tennis purse.
Thus we catch a glimpse of a few of the many actors and institutions on the supply-side of the cigarette equation in the 1950s and
1960s. The agentive moments of advertisers, consultants, editors, consumers, and commentators were as many as they were complicated—
and through these, a group called “African Americans” was identified
in various and contradictory ways. While on the one hand, equality in
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advertising posed a way out of the racist portrayals of African
Americans, on the other a movement that defined liberation in terms
of cultural expression (and struggled to determine what that would
mean) rather than the freedom to consume sundry Americana was
already taking hold. Yet, as with other subcultures, various groups of
African Americans took the cigarette into their modes of expression,
and tobacco companies seemed to know exactly how to make this
happen.
Regardless of how questions of agency and choice are framed, there
is simply no way around the fact that cigarettes have had a devastating
impact on the African American community: tobacco smoking is the
number one killer and disabler of African Americans. It results in more
deaths among Black Americans than homicide, car accidents, drug
abuse, and AIDS combined. It intensifies serious health problems that
disproportionately affect Black Americans: hypertension, diabetes,
low birth weight, infant mortality, and hazardous occupational exposures.57 The incidence of tobacco-related cancers including that of
the lung, esophagus, oral cavity, and larynx; heart disease; and cerebrovascular disease all have a higher incidence in Blacks than in Whites.
Lung cancer accounts for 25 percent of all cancer cases in Black males
(as opposed to 14 percent for White males) and increased 220 percent
between 1950 and 1985 (compared to an increase of 86 percent in
White men).58 In 1992 lung cancer became the leading cause of cancer
mortality among African American women aged 55–74 years.59 Blacks
also tend to be diagnosed when diseases are at a later stage than
Whites and have a significantly lower survival rate after diagnosis.60
A further crucial point to make here is that not only do socioeconomic differences account for smoking’s exacerbation of other health
problems, but also education is a primary indicator of who will
smoke. It is well established that smoking rates are about twice as high
for adults with less than a high school diploma when compared with
those with four or more years of college.61 Smoking is related to
education in another key way—the children of smokers suffer from a
significantly higher incidence of low birth weight, lower IQ, higher
incidence of learning disorders, more sick days, and a higher rate of
asthma and other respiratory disorders. Thus, smokers’ kins’ physical
injuries constitute them as less able to share in social goods—material
and cultural—at the same time as they require more access to
medical, educational, and financial resources.
While Brown cites the cause of the attraction of menthols to
African Americans as the focused and deceptive advertising for
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a highly addictive product, tobacco companies claim a simple supply–
demand curve. Meanwhile, a few medical studies cite the excess injury
in an African American body more susceptible to the harms of tobacco
smoke. Still, that a preference for menthols has existed among certain
African Americans is uncontested. Given the wreckage of this product,
what are we to make of the particularity of this hybrid?
Tobacco and mint leaves have likely been mixed together and
smoked for thousands of years, and menthol crystals have been added
to snuff (tobacco powder) for hundreds of years. In the age of the
contemporary cigarette, however, mentholation—which acts as a mild
anesthetic that numbs the throat to the harsh elements of tobacco
smoke and thus allows a deeper and longer inhalation—was introduce
by Axton-Fisher with a cigarette called “Spud.” Brown and Williamson
(B&W), formed in 1894, launched the mentholated “Kool” in 1933
and priced it at 15 cents, 25 percent cheaper than Spud, and swiftly
outsold it.62 The first ads featured a penguin and inaugurated the
70-year bid to associate menthol cigarettes with refreshment and the
outdoors. “Like a week by the sea, this smoke. . . . is a tonic to hot,
tired throats.”63 The award-winning 1946 ad focuses on the pharmaceutical value of Kools, “Head stopped up? Got the Sneezes? Switch to
Kools . . . the flavor pleases!”64
Notwithstanding recent taxes, cigarettes have traditionally provided
a cheap and accessible indulgence to all classes, and gaining momentum
throughout the century, cigarette companies have ensured that smoking
has been introduced to literally hundreds of cross-referenced niche markets. Sometime in the 1950s or 1960s, mentholated cigarettes came to
be identified—at least by Blacks (a fact that was noted in contemporary
industry documents65)—as a Black product, though the contentious
issue here is which came first, the targeting or the preference. Industry
attorney Jeffrey G. Weil claimed, “The targeting is not because they’re
African-American—it’s because they like menthol cigarettes.”66 Various
reasons for this seeming tautology have been offered by sociologists,
marketers, and smokers. Charyn Sutton, for example, a plaintiff in the
Brown class action suit and president of Onyx Group, Philadelphia,
said that B&W “put extra effort into promoting menthol cigarettes to
Blacks,” and discusses how “when I was in high school they [B&W]
made the penguin into a person, and we really thought he was a stand
in for African Americans because at that time African Americans really
couldn’t be portrayed in ads in the general market. . . . The class took
that penguin and made him the class mascot—that’s how intense the
identification was by that kind of advertising.”67
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African American’s preference for menthols has also been explained
as a cultural preference, or as identification with the vernacular roots
of “cool.” But it is highly possible that the mentholation of cigarettes
also resonates with menthol’s roots in folk medicine and over-the-counter
drugs. Oil of peppermint, from which menthol is steam distilled, has
been used as an ingredient of medicinal mixtures for thousands of
years. Its popularity with the lay public stemmed from its use, combined with sodium bicarbonate or powdered rhubarb, as a treatment
for a wide range of conditions, including as an antacid, appetite stimulant, and purgative. Mentholated commercial products, such as
lozenges, inhalers, and chest rubs, were common in Britain and North
America by the mid-nineteenth century.68 Reports that African
Americans have spent 2–4 times as much as White Americans on over
the counter medications,69 likely as a result of their disenfranchisement from medical institutions, indicate a possible identification with
mentholated products and coincides particularly with the way that
Kools were advertised for their purported medicinal properties.70
Whichever came first, targeting or taste, market studies attest to
a strong preference for menthols among African Americans—both for
the qualities of the cigarette as well as for its image. For example, in
1980, as Philip Morris, planning its own niche advertising strategy for
the cigarette “Merit,” had a 166 page document prepared on ethnic
marketing.71 Several pages are dedicated to analyzing the success of
Kool cigarettes, and the document quotes African American smokers
who focus on taste, style, and loyalty. Kools were considered by smokers
to be “so smooth and mild you can smoke them all the time,” and they
work “like an anesthetic.” Smokers described the experience of smoking
Kools as “relaxing,” a means of “escape,” and as a way to meditate.
Kool style was considered to be the crucial element to Kool’s success. Kool was “heavily” associated with a very positive, often glamorous self-image: “to be cool you smoke kool”; “smoking a kool? Like
riding a Rolls Royce.” The study concluded that “Kool smokers see
themselves as very stylish and apart from other smokers who haven’t
made it to Kools”; they were, as the 1967 advertisement reflects,
separate from the crowd. These reactions to the Kool advertisements
were reflected by one Black smoker’s reminiscences in 2000: “I don’t
know if I smoked because I saw the ads. I do know that they made me
feel a certain way, like I was part of that whole glamour thing.”72
Though the smokers’ testimony collected by Philip Morris may
seem too simple in its reiteration of advertising’s promises, it also
makes clear the extent to which the identity of the Kools smoker was
93
wrapped up in the expression of taste as a measure of class and good
breeding. Like other highly advertised products, such as Coca-Cola,
that are taken into the body in a pleasurable way, or like other intimate
personal embellishments such as purses, pocket knives, or Mustangs
that are exhibited, cigarettes express, through consumption and display,
an identity, style, fashion, self. This versatility in expressing a variety
of identities is a distinguishing feature of the cigarette: the consumer
believes it to express what he or she wants it to. Thus, in the early century, advertising virtuoso Edward Bernays (perhaps not incidentally
Freud’s double nephew) allied cigarettes with women’s liberation as
“torches of freedom” and thus began the long history of identifying
smoking with nearly every market niche’s evolving desires—from
patriotism, liberation, weight loss, sexuality, stress relief, daring, hipness.
More recently, other campaigns have more or less successfully attempted
to expand this image set to include filth, tackiness, dependence, and
uncool.
The facility with which cigarettes can be consumed is not mirrored
in their renunciation. The abysmal rates of success of quitting for all
Americans demonstrate the severity of nicotine addiction, as well as
the high resource intensity of the project. Antismoking is a multibillion
dollar industry that includes counseling, nicotine patches, gum,
and Zyban.73 Of those who quit cold turkey on their own, only
3–4 percent succeed, while with stop-smoking drugs the rate rises to
10 percent.74 A combination of the drugs with counseling increases the
rate to 20 percent. For African Americans, statistics reveal poorer
results. While on average African Americans attempt to quit more
often than White Americans, studies have shown their attempts to be
34 percent less successful.75
Different studies have highlighted varying reasons for these racially
disparate statistics, focusing on class access to medical care, genetic
reasons for susceptibility to the poisons in smoke, cultural aspects of
smoking, and the purported characteristics of the Black body. For
example, minority smokers are both less likely to participate in smoking
cessation programs (which can be expensive) than the general population, and less likely to receive cessation advice from health care
providers.76 It has also been suggested that African Americans metabolize carcinogens and nicotine more slowly than White Americans.77
Recent studies suggests that menthol smokers have greater addiction
rates since a higher inhalation of smoke (because of the anesthetic
effect of menthol) leads to higher nicotine and carbon monoxide levels.
Thus, African Americans, who tend to smoke menthols, would be
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Sarah S. Jain
more at risk, though they average fewer cigarettes (15 versus 19) per
day. Richard Pollay’s research also finds that tobacco companies
advertised fewer products in the African American press, and that “filters were offered by ads to Blacks years after being promoted to White
consumers.”78 While filters have not been found to defray the health
effects of cigarettes, this fact seems to indicate that tobacco companies
believed these customers to be less health conscious and/or less well
educated.
Further evidence considers the design of menthol cigarettes. By the
1960s, tobacco companies understood the cigarette as a drug delivery
device, monitoring and managing the quantity of nicotine in the product. For example, in 1964 the legal counsel for B&W advised the initiation of a search for a cigarette that would remove the “unattractive
side effects of smoking [cancer],” while still upholding a “challenge
[to] those charges [of the Surgeon General that cigarette smoking is
extremely dangerous]” and still deliver “a nice jolt of nicotine.”79
A Philip Morris scientist, Al Udow, contended in 1972 that Kool had
the highest nicotine delivery of any king-size cigarette on the market.
He wrote that this was its secret to success, and recommended that PM
also “pursue this . . . in developing a menthol entry.”80 Although it
would still be difficult to argue that the industry had a clear intent to
market a more dangerous product to African Americans, certainly by
1972 B&W was well aware Blacks were particularly attracted to mentholated brands. In 1994, B&W admitted—after initially denying that
it bred plants for specific nicotine levels—that it had developed and
imported (from Brazil) a tobacco plant that contained twice the
amount of nicotine that was in regular American tobaccos.81 These
facts indicate that smokers of menthols, particularly the B&W brand
Kool, will have a significantly higher level of addiction than smokers
of other cigarettes.
Unraveling these moments of how the smoking institution has fixed
race as a category—by calculation or elision—and thus giving it meaning, has been the key point of this essay. Advertisers interpreted
African Americans as an always already psychologically injured group
that needed and responded to respect in the creation of desires. While
they did this to suit their own ends, the appalling caricatures of
African Americans in advertising may have made the penguin appealing to Black (would-be) smokers, as plaintiff Charyn Sutton pointed
out. The distribution of educational and medical services based on
financial means has disproportionately affected African Americans,
and at once indicates the possible attraction of menthol as well as the
95
fact that African Americans are less likely to receive cessation advice
and that their diseases are treated at a later stage. For John H.
Johnson, his race kept him from earning the billions that he could have
earned, and it proscribed how he defined what African Americans
needed, desired, and aspired to—in his magazine and in his selling of
the community to advertisers. Genetic studies of African Americans
attempt to show that Black people metabolize carcinogens differently.
For a social group that had, for historical reasons, a particularly small
gene pool (such as Ashkenazi Jews) this conclusion may make sense.
But a pool as diverse as that which has been socially consolidated as
“African American,” presents difficulties to this type of genetic
research, and biologists such as Joseph Graves and Stephen Jay Gould
have shown that race has no biological validity.82 On the other hand,
research—based in social, cultural, or ethnic practices—such as that on
smoking cessation, “has been conducted almost exclusively in White,
middle-class populations.”83 Thus, race is constituted through—and
only becomes meaningful through—the shifting corroborations of these
economic and cultural interests. Tobacco corporations have attempted to
manipulate these but they are by no means the only actors.
Conclusion
Not only the injury caused by smoking itself, but also the turning to
injured status through law “on behalf of Black smokers,” collaborates
in creating an injured and racialized group. And here is where the
example of cigarettes both reflects consumer culture more generally
and zeros in the specificity of the cigarette, for the right being claimed
is also a right to have the cultural respect and self-esteem to what? Not
to have started smoking in the first place? Not to have culturally or
racially specific advertising? The specificity of the danger of mentholation over and above other tobacco flavorings surely does not override
the clear indication that the right being claimed to nondiscriminatory
consumption is not only to be free from physical injury, but also from
the preceding cultural and economic injuries that have to do with
many decisions about smoking, not only of mentholated cigarettes and
not only by African Americans. Thus the claim for rights to equal
opportunities in consumption cuts deeply into the socioeconomics of
U.S. culture. Brown is a symptom of the broader inability of U.S.
institutions to both structure the most physically dangerous aspects of
capitalist production and to deeply comprehend and eradicate racism.
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Sarah S. Jain
Another way to look at race, might be through the relation of
African Americans to injury: through an injured groups’ turn to law
and very specific self-definition as those injured through use of a
particular product, through the consequences of the use of a more
dangerous product and its access to fewer medical resources, and
through ads that both portrayed and took advantage of the real and
assumed “psychological injuries” of centuries of racism. The discrimination at stake in the Brown case and others like it includes not only
the right to not be targeted with more dangerous products and to be
treated with respect where they spend their money (as the 1964 Civil
Rights Acts claims), they ineluctably also include having the education
to know about products that are not advertised directly to them or the
consequences of which are not written about in their magazines.84
They necessarily include having access to medical resources and scientific research that has included responsible race specific research—
even as many self-identified African Americans support the interests of
tobacco companies. In this way, the structure of racialized injury goes
far beyond consumption by choice. The particular issue that Brown
presents is not only the racialized claim for rights to equality in
consumption, but also an expression that is echoed in all tobacco
litigation: of regret. I shall only briefly address each of these here.
Claiming a right from the state conceals the ways in which African
Americans were produced as a racialized group through the interacting forces, some of which I have elucidated here, of corporations, marketers, activists, governments, and so on. Thus, as Wendy Brown has
so magnificently argued, that developing “a righteous critique of
power from the perspective of the injured . . . delimits a specific cite of
blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as
responsible for the ‘injury’ of social subordination.” Such claims, she
contends, cast “the law in particular and the state more generally as
neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselves invested with the
power to injure.”85 This point is particularly poignant given the
multiple factors of education, medical access, and class that determine
smoking practice and its effects. Furthermore, it is uniquely illustrated
by the way that cigarette companies could provide African Americans
the freedom to consume in a new way in the 1950s and the 1960s
while also providing means for cultural expression by sponsoring
programs of all kinds.
Finally, tobacco cases more generally, and this one in particular,
raises a key anthropological predicament of injury law, and one that is
at the heart of the moralism that has tended to pervade both the
97
pro- and anti-smoking debates. Which are we to privilege: the agent
with its series of knowledges about the cigarette, the corporation, the
law, and the body that decided to smoke and kept smoking for years?
Or the agent that, with a different set of knowledges and a new
diseased body, takes on a different subcultural identity—that of the
injured—and decides to sue? The morality play that sees the legal
contest as one between (self-righteous or innocent) smoker, and
(greedy or paternal) corporation misses the key way in which these
agentive moments can be understood in some sense as the shifting
identity of what Ulrich Beck calls the “biographic solution to systematic contradictions” where both consumption and injury are built in to
economic environments.86
To take this argument one step further is to begin to understand
how the cigarette is both unique among products in its injuring potential, but also how it is symptomatic of the place of physical injury in
capitalism. Consider that the importance of the tobacco industry to
the U.S. economy has for decades been used to argue against its regulation, even though it is considered unique among products for its
capacity to injure when used as intended.87 Thus, we might understand the injury caused by [cigarette] consumption as a sort of collateral damage—an unavoidable but regrettable side affect of consumer
capitalism and the health of the economy, at the same time as it
involves (requires?) the destruction of the presumed reason for the
economy in the first place—the citizenry. The Brown suit emerges—as
does other tobacco litigation—as a symptom of deeply serious political fissures that cut across, as they consolidate, both race and class,
but they also demonstrate how injury categories fissure in ways that
cannot solely be reduced to only these analytic categories.
Put most simply, the two linked arguments I develop here are as
follows. First, that the language of rights—the right to consume on an
equal basis, or the right not to be injured in consumption, blots out an
understanding of the ways that mentholated cigarettes, in particular,
circulate in economies that cannot be satisfactorily traced solely to
an evil (as in aberrant) corporation and a neutral government. Second,
in the agentive moments separated by time (the liberal chooser and the
injured litigant), race is mutually produced in the actions of human
and nonhuman actors: scientists, advertising agencies, farmers, popular
magazines, government agencies, nonsmoking lobbies, cells, trains, facts
about smoking, cessation programs, product liability laws, civil rights
claims. To return, then, to the problem of “object-responsibility” is to
note that the continuing fascination of the cigarette lies precisely in the
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Sarah S. Jain
way that it has so completely flaunted any question of responsibility or
accountability to anything but itself. In that sense at least, the cigarette
has been a true American icon.
Notes
Hearty thanks are due to my friends, colleagues, and relatives who have
contributed to this essay through discussion, reading drafts, and inviting me to
present this work-in-progress: Genevieve Bell, Susan Boyd, Ruth Buchanan, Evelyn
Jain, Matthew Kohrman, Jake Kosek, Samara Marion, Catherine Newman,
Richard Pollay, Matt Price, Robert Rabin, Derek Simons, Ann Stoler, Lucy
Suchman, Victoria Vesna, Robert Weems, Sylvia Yanagasako, Claire Young and
the participants of the HRI seminar at UCSC, including Deborah Bright, Angela Y.
Davis, Gina Dent, Laura Kuo, and Neferti Tadiar. I also would like to acknowledge
the able research assistance of Colleen Pearl. This essay was written with support
from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada and from the
Killam Foundation, and is dedicated in gratitude to my dissertation advisor and
mentor Donna J. Haraway. Please direct correspondence to [email protected].
1. Second Amended Class Action Complaint, Section A.5.
2. Rev. Jesse Brown et al. versus Philip Morris, Inc., et al., 1999 WL 783712
(E.D.Pa.). September 22, 1999.
3. Michael Bail, Caroline Scooler, David G. Altman, Michael Slater et al., “How
Cigarettes Are Advertised in Magazines: Special Messages for Special Markets”
Health Communication, 3(2), 75–91. Menthol has only very recently been
studied for potential carcinogenic compounds, and the issue is still controversial.
4. Claims of breach of warranty or fraud and misrepresentation were state law
claims, not Civil Rights claims, and therefore dismissed by the Pennsylvania
U.S. District Court. Brown’s other claims, brought under section 1983 were
dismissed since Brown was unable to show that tobacco companies should be
understood as “state actors.” Similarly, charges brought under section 1985(3)
were dismissed on statutory grounds.
5. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 295.
6. B&W document cited in New York Times News Service, “Tobacco Industry’s
Ad Assault on Blacks is Detailed in Records Newly released,” Sunday February 8,
1998.
7. In 1974 B&W sold 56.1 billion units of KOOL after spending $15 million for
advertising the cigarette in 1973. “Brown & Williamson Tobacco Co.”
Advertising Age, August 26, 1974. RJR introduced Salem in 1956, the first
filter-tip menthol, which by 1960 outsold Kool 3–1. By the late 1960s, however,
B&W’s Kool was again the largest selling mentholated brand—thanks to a
much touted and emulated advertising campaign.
8. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From
the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd edn (New York, London: Routledge, 1994), 99.
99
9. Cited in “Tobacco Timeline,” available at: ⬍http://www.tobacco.org/History/
Tobacco_History.html⬎ (Copyright 1993–2001 Gene Borio).
10. Editor’s introduction, Ebony, August 1967.
11. Paul M. Hirsch, “An Analysis of Ebony: The Magazine and Its Readers,”
Journalism Quarterly, 45: 261–270 and 292 (1968).
12. Ibid., pp. 267–268. In 1966, circulation was 926,644. The Negro Handbook
(Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., 1966), 384.
13. K.A. Wall. “Positioning your brand in the Black market.” Advertising Age, 44
(25), 1973: 71–76. Other 1960s ads for mentholated cigarettes collected in the
Archive of Cigarette Advertising at the University of British Columbia.
14. John H. Johnson with Leone Bennett, Jr., Succeeding Against the Odds:
The Inspiring Autobiography of One of America’s Wealthiest Entrepreneurs
(New York: Warner Books, 1989), 90.
15. As described in The Negro Handbook, compiled by the Editors of Ebony,
Johnson Publishing Company, Inc., Chicago, 1966. This compilation of facts
and statistics on the African American community, was, suggests Robert
Weems, possibly a guide to the Black community for White corporations—
with a distinct bias against Black-owned businesses. Robert E. Weems,
Desegregating the Dollar: African American Consumerism in the Twentieth
Century (New York and London: New York University Press, 1998).
16. John H. Johnson and Leone Bennett, Jr., Succeeding Against the Odds, 161. In
1967, a full-page black and white ad cost $5,870 for a one-time printing,
while a four-color cost $9,075—the guaranteed circulation was one million.
“Admans’ Guide to Negro Media,” Sponsor (Negro Market Supplement),
21, July 1967: 42–45, 48–51.
17. In addition to a number of publications, Johnson produced two films,
“There’s Gold in Your Backyard” and “The Secret of Selling to the Negro.”
18. John H. Johnson and Leone Bennett, Jr., Succeeding Against the Odds, 230.
19. No author noted, “Admans’ Guide to Negro Media,” Sponsor (Negro Market
Supplement), 21, July 1967: 42–45, 48–51.
20. Weems, Desegregating the Dollar, p. 46
21. Ibid., 26.
22. David J. Sullivan, “Don’t do This—If You Want to Sell Your Products to
Negroes!” Sales Management 52 (March 1, 1943): 46–51.
23. In a 1952 article in Advertising Age, Johnson advised would-be advertisers
not to “use the term ‘nigger,’ ‘negress,’ ‘darky’ or ‘boy.’ John H. Johnson,
“Does Your Sales Force Know How to Sell the Negro Trade? Some Do’s and
Don’ts,” Advertising Age, March 17, 1952.
24. Arnold M. Barban and Edward W. Cundiff, “Negro and White Responses to
Advertising Stimuli,” Journal of Marketing Research 1964: 53–56.
25. “Ebony Survey Reveals Negro Buying Habits,” Advertising Age, 21, July 29,
1950: 16–17.
26. Marcus Alexis, “Pathways to the Negro Market,” Journal of Negro
Education, 28(2), Spring 1959: 115 (pp. 114–127).
27. Johnson, Advertising Age, 1952.
28. “The Forgotten 15,000,000 . . . Three Years Later,” Sponsor, 6, July 28,
1952: 76–77.
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Sarah S. Jain
29. “Because of the psychological considerations involved, Negros are extremely
desirous of being identified as customers who recognize and demand quality
merchandise.” “Ebony Survey Reveals Negro Buying Habits,” Advertising
Age, 21, August 1950: 17.
30. T.J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the
Therapeutic Roots of Consumer Culture, 1880–1930” in The Culture of
Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, edited by
Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books),
1–38.
31. Henry Allen Bullock, “Consumer Motivations in Black and White—I,”
Harvard Business Review, 38, May/June 1961: 99.
32. Ibid., 102.
33. Leiss discusses how in consumer culture “class” is about learning to consume
at a particular level. William Leiss, The Limits to Satisfaction: An Essay on the
Problem of Needs and Commodities (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1976).
34. Dave Berkman, Journalism Quarterly, 40, 1963: 43–64.
35. Bullock, “Consumer Motivations—II,” 113.
36. “Admans Guide” quoting Moss H. Kendrix, African American owner of a
Washington consulting firm, on p. 42. Italicized in original. The article goes
on to note that, “although the Negro no longer wants to be white, he most
certainly wants to have the same things and do the same things as white
people” (42).
37. E. Franklin Frazier, Black Bourgeoisie (Glencoe, II: The Free Press, 1957), 56.
38. Ibid., p. 173.
39. No author given, “Clients Seek Advice on Negro Market,” Sponsor (Negro
Market Supplement), vol. 20, July 25, 1966, 40–43. The article notes that
R.J. Reynolds Tobacco ranks first and Liggett & Myers seventh for advertisers providing the most business on “Negro-appeal” radio stations.
40. No author given, “Yule Boycott is Senseless, Johnson Says,” Advertising Age,
October 21, 1963, 3; “No Christmas Boycott,” The Crisis, vol. 70,
November, 1963, 555–556, “Will Negroes back Christmas Boycott?”
Advertising Week, October 4, 1963.
41. Ramona Bechtos, “Ads in Negro-Market Media do Double Duty with Negro
Buyers, Zimmer Says,” Advertising Age, January 13, 1964, 72. No author,
“Be Sure Negroes Featured in Ads are Identified with Civil Rights Effort:
Robinson,” Advertising Age, April 10, 1967, 12. This article reports Jackie
Robinson advocating the use of prominent African Americans who are
affiliated with the Civil Rights movement in advertising.
42. No author given, “Ads Alone Won’t Win Negro Market: Russell,”
Advertising Age, October 21, 1963, 3, 130.
43. Ibid.
44. No author given, “Clients Seek Advice,” 43.
45. “L&M Cigarettes Pitched to Blacks as ‘Superbad’ ” Advertising Age.
46. See, e.g., John H. Pierce, Ph.D.; Lora Lee, M.A.; Elizabeth Gilpin, M.S.,
“Smoking Initiation by Adolescent Girls, 1944 Through 1988: An Association
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
101
with Targeted Advertising.” Journal of the American Medical Association
271(8), February 23, 1994: 608–611.
Tomas E. Novotny, Kenneth E. Warner, Juliette S. Kendrick, Patrick L.
Remington, “Smoking By Blacks and Whites: Socioeconomic and Demographic
Differences.” AJPH, 79(9), September 1988: 1187–1189.
Stuart Ewen, PR!: A Social History of Spin, Basic Books, 1996.
Hirsch reports that by 1966, “CORE, SNCC, and the Southern Christian
Leadership Conference Were out of Favor with Ebony and its Readers.” “An
Analysis of Ebony,” 267.
Many thanks to Deborah Bright, who offered me substantial written feedback
on a very early draft.
Personal communication, December 2000.
Roy Norr, “Cancer by the Carton,” Reader’s Digest, December, 1952: 7–10.
See also R.C. Smith, “The Magazines’ Smoking Habit: Magazines that have
Accepted Growing Amounts of Cigarette Advertising have Failed to Cover
Tobacco’s Threat to Health,” Columbia Journalism Review, January/
February 1978.
“Advertising; RJR Flap Not the First in Ad History,” Philip H. Dougherty,
New York Times, April 7, 1988. Cited in “Tobacco Timeline,” Copyright
1993–2001 Gene Borio, available at: ⬍http://www.tobacco.org/History/
Tobacco_History.html⬎.
“Nor did Ebony editors express any interest in covering the historic conference
on the Realities of Cancer in Minority Communities.” Alan Blum, “The
Targeting of Minority Group by the Tobacco Industry,” edited by L.A. Jones
Minorities and Cancer, New York: Springer Verlag, 1989: 153–162.
Thomas Laqweur, “Smoking and Nothingness,” The New Republic, 47, 48.
Ironically, the growth of a White middle class and its attendant White flight
enabled the high-density inner-city neighborhoods to became crucibles for
high-density advertising (billboards, buses, bus stops).
Karen Ahijevych and Mary Ellen Wewers, “Factors Associated with Nicotine
Dependence among African American Women Cigarette Smokers,” Research
in Nursing and Health, 16, 1993: 283–292.
Henry Weinstein and Alissa J. Rubin, “Tobacco Firms Targeted Blacks,
Documents Show,” Los Angeles Times, February 6, 1998.
Laurie Hoffman-Goetz, Karen K. Gerlach, Christina Marino, Sherry L. Mills,
“Cancer Coverage and Tobacco Advertising in African-American’s Popular
Magazines,” Journal of Community Health, 22(4), August 1997: 261–271.
This study was done on adult women, and supports the observation that
women read popular magazines in order to acquire information rather than
from habit.
United States Department of Health and Human Services, “Health Status of
Minorities and Low-Income Groups,” 17 (1990).
David Koepke, Brian R. Flay, C. Anderson Johnson, “Health Behaviors in
minority families: The case of cigarette Smoking.” Family and Community
Health, May 1990, 35–43. See also Gilbert J. Botvin, Eli Baker, Catherine J.
Goldberg, Linda Dusenbury, and Elizabeth M. Botvin, “Correlates and
102
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
Sarah S. Jain
Predictors of Smoking Among Black Adolescents,” Addictive Behaviors,
17, 1992: 97–103.
Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 93.
Ibid.
Ad on file at The History of Advertising Archives, University of British
Columbia, curated by Richard Pollay.
See, e.g., “A Pilot Look at the Attitudes of Negro Smokers Toward Menthol
Cigarettes,” Submitted to Philip Morris Inc., New York, Submitted By: Tibor
Koeves Associates, Sag Harbor, N.Y. September, 1968. Available at
⬍http://www.pmdocs.com/⬎. This study concludes that “here was a product
[menthols] which by some virtue was especially suited to the needs, desires,
and tastes of Negro consumers,” 2–3.
Quoted in “Court Urged to Dismiss Menthol Cigarette Class Action,” Law
News Network, Thursday, April 8, 1999.
Quoted from National Public Radio, “As it Happens,” November 2, 1998.
R. Eccles, “Menthol and Related Cooling Compounds,” Journal of Pharmacy
and Pharmacology, 46, 1994: 46, 618–630. Menthol can also be extracted or
synthesized from other essential oils such as citronella, eucalyptus, and Indian
turpentine oils. Eccles cites a number of studies that demonstrate that menthol
inhalation causes “a subjective nasal decongestant effect without any objective
decongestant action” (622). Thanks to Stuart Anderson of the London School of
Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Katie Eagleton assistant curator of the London
Science Museum, and George Twigg for e-mail communication on this issue.
Weems, Desegregating the Dollar, 34. In 1963 Dave Berkman found 49 ads
for patent medicines and other health aids in Ebony compared to only 14 in
Life. He notes that this “was not an unexpected finding in a magazine whose
readership contains such a high proportion of people engaged in work
demanding heavy physical exertion (and a race whose memberships’
deaths occur, on the average, about eight years earlier than among the White
population)” (Berkman, “Advertising in ‘Ebony’ and ‘Life,’ ” 54–55).
“Documents about the Kool brand showed that the company sought to
‘capitalize upon the erroneous consumer perception that their [sic] is a health
benefit to smoking mentholated cigarettes.’ Richard Pollay, “Getting Good
and Being Super Bad: Chapters in the Promotion of Cigarettes to Blacks,”
Working Paper, The History of Advertising Archives, University of British
Columbia, 1993, 18. The Philip Morris document “A Pilot Look at the
Attitudes” also quotes several smokers who believe that menthols are better
for ones health (7).
See the “secret tobacco documents” posted on ⬍www.tobacco.org⬎, “Merit
Ethnic Research,” prepared for Philip Morris, February 1, 1980, 166 pages
scanned into the site. All quotes in this paragraph are from 101–106.
Warren Mitchell quoted in Tracey Reeves, “A Targeted Payback; Black
Communities in Md. Want More Tobacco Money,” Washington Post,
Wednesday, February 16, 2000.
Zyban is the trade name for the antidepressant drug bupropion hydrochloride
for which there is not yet a generic form. Extrapolating from Canadian figures
(since I have been unable to find complete U.S. figures), Americans would
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
79.
103
spend about $10 billion per year on drugs and counseling (Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, “Marketplace,” February 16, 2000). This extrapolation is based on population only, it does not account for the vastly inflated
cost of healthcare in the U.S. or for the aggressive governmental anti-smoking
campaign in Canada.
Mayo Clinic web site.
Fiore M.C., Novotny T.E., Pierce J.P., Hatziandreu E.J., Patel K.M., Davis
R.M. Trends in cigarette smoking in the US: the changing influence of gender
and race. JAMA, 261, 1989: 49–55.
Department of Health and Human Services, Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health
Promotion, Office on Smoking and Health, 1998. U.S. Department of Health
and Human Services. Tobacco Use Among U.S. Racial/Ethnic Minority
Groups African Americans, American Indians and Alaska Natives, Asian
Americans and Pacific Islanders, and Hispanics: A Report of the Surgeon
General. Atlanta, Georgia: U.S. “Appendix: A Brief History of Tobacco
advertising Targeting African Americans.”
For studies that show a possible genetic difference between African Americans
and Whites in the metabolization of nicotine, indicating that Black smokers
have a higher exposure to cigarette’s carcinogenic components even when they
smoke fewer cigarettes, see “Editorial, “Pharmacogenics and Ethnoracial
Differences in Smoking,” JAMA, 280(2), July 8, 1998: 170–180; Ralph S.
Caraballo et al., “Racial and Ethnic Differences in Serum Cotinine Levels of
Cigarette Smokers,” JAMA, 280(2), July 8, 1998: 135–139; Eliseo J. PerezStable, MD et al., “Nicotine Metabolism and Intake in Black and White
Smokers,” JAMA, 280(2), July 8, 1998: 152–156; Karen Ahijevych and Lea Ann
Parsley, “Smoke Constituent Exposure and Stage of Change in Black and White
Women Cigarette Smokers,” Addictive Behaviors, 24(1), 1999: 115–120. None
of these studies questions a generic use of genetic categories as “black” or
“white.” William Feigelman and Bernard Gorman found that class and stress differences, rather than race, account for variations in smoking behavior and that
race is primarily a correlate of other demographic features. See “Toward
Explaining the Higher Incidence of Cigarette Smoking Among Black Americans,”
Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, 21(3), July–September 1989: 299–305. For the
importance of “cultural” as opposed to “socioeconomic” factors, see Geoffrey
C. Kabat, Alfredo Morabia, and Ernst L. Wyner, “Comparison of Smoking
Habits of Blacks and Whites in a Case-Control Study,” American Journal of
Public Health, 81(11), November 1991: 1483–1486.
Pollay, “Separate but Equal,” 52.
Addison Yeaman cited in Cigarette Papers, 54. Nicotine was always known to
be the central ingredient to cigarettes. A senior scientist for PM wrote this in
a confidential document released in a 1988 trial, “Think of the cigarette as a
storage container for a day’s supply of nicotine.” Reported in Jerry Carroll,
“Killing Us Softly: Women, a prime target of cigarette advertisers, are about
to overtake men as the tobacco industry’s best customer,” San Francisco
Chronicle, September 1, 1996: 4. Smoke is considered the optimal vehicle for
nicotine absorption.
104
Sarah S. Jain
80. Cited in “Tobacco Timeline,” Copyright 1993–2001 Gene Borio, available at:
⬍http://www.tobacco.org/History/Tobacco_History.html⬎.
81. Cited in Brown, section 170. At that time, four million pounds of the high
nicotine imported tobacco, used in five brands, were found in B&W’s
warehouses. Tobacco companies also add several ammonia compounds to
cigarettes in order to increase the nicotine transfer efficiency.
82. Joseph L. Graves, Jr. The Emperor’s New Clothes: Biological Theories of Race
at the Millennium (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001).
83. Kolawole S. Okuyemi, M.D., M.P.H.; Jasjit S. Ahluwalia, M.D., M.P.H.,
M.S.; Kari J. Harris, Ph.D., M.P.H. “Pharmacotherapy of Smoking
Cessation,” Family Medicine, 9(3), March 2000.
84. This suit could be linked to accident law and race in the nineteenth century.
Nan Goodman, e.g., shows how “the law of the Good Samaritan helped
significantly to designate African Americans as a class of expendable accident
victims—a class defined by its existing marginality and by its actual or imagined incompetence, whose purpose was to have the accidents and bear the
injuries the middle classes would then be fit to avoid.” Shifting the Blame:
Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth Century America
(New York: Routledge, 1999), 119.
85. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 27.
86. Ulich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London; Newbury
Park, Claif: Sage, Publications 1992), 137.
87. A provision in the United States Code put it this way: “the marketing of
tobacco constitutes one of the greatest basic industries of the United States
with ramifying interests which directly affect interstate and foreign commerce
at every point, and stable conditions are necessary, therefore, to the general
welfare.” 7 U.S.C. section 1311(a), cited in FDA versus Brown & Williamson
in the majority opinion to support the argument that Congress never intended
that the FDA regulate tobacco products.
Part II
Self/Identity, Memory/History
6
Conjuring up Traces of Historical
Violence: Grandpa,Who is Not in
the Photo
Naono Akiko
So that the terrible evil that brought so much suffering to Hiroshima may never happen
again, let us remember—works of love and prayer are works of peace.
—Mother Teresa, 1984
It would be sufficient for my present purpose to say that if any indiscriminate destruction
of civilian life and property is still illegitimate in warfare, then, in the Pacific war, this decision to use the atom bomb is the only near approach to the directives of the German
Emperor during the first world war and of the Nazi leaders during the second world war.
—Judge Radhabinod Pal of India, International Military Tribunal
for the Far East, 1946
Whereas the role of the Enola Gay during World War II was momentous in helping to
bring World War II to a merciful end, which resulted in saving the lives of Americans and
Japanese. . . . Now, therefore, be it Resolved, that it is the sense of the Senate that any
exhibit displayed by the National Air and Space Museum with respect to the Enola Gay
should reflect appropriate sensitivity toward the men and women who faithfully and
selflessly served the United States during World War II and should avoid impugning the
memory of those who gave their lives for freedom.
—United States Senate Resolution 257, 1994
It was good that the United States dropped the atomic bombs on Japan, because it hastened our independence [from Japan]. I think Japan [was atom-bombed] as a result of
invading Asian countries, including Korea.
—Chang Pyŏng-hyŏn, 19871
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Naono Akiko
We refer to the extraordinary experience of horror as “a nightmare”; but what happened that day is far more horrifying than a “nightmare.” . . . One day, I was describing
[what I witnessed on that day] just as requested. My friend was drawn into my tale. I
was just about to move onto the scene inside a streetcar—passengers were charred to
death sitting on the two rows of seats. Suddenly, I found myself taking pleasure in talking fluently [about that day] and drawing the listener into my tale.“No, I ought not to
talk about that day like this. It cannot be talked smoothly.” I tasted bitterness in my
throat—I was at loss of words. Since then until today, I have never spoken of that day.
—Hachiya Kazuye 1993: 116–117
Shadow in the Photo
On the day of my omiya mairi [a shrine visit of a newborn baby],
Grandma and her sister visited us from Hiroshima. Grandpa could not
make it, so he is not in the photo (see figure 6.1).
* * *
When I was about four or five years old, I expressed to Mom my
uneasiness about the absence of one grandpa: I had seen two grandmas
but only one grandpa.
“Ojiichan [Grandpa] and Obaachan [Grandma] are in Niihama.
Why only Obaachan in Hiroshima? Where is Ojiichan?”
“Your ojiichan in Hiroshima died because of the atomic bombing.”
* * *
“Hiroshima” evokes various memories in the minds of people across the
globe. On the one hand, it is remembered by some as one of the greatest
tragedies of the twentieth century. Such remembrance celebrates the
“Spirit of Hiroshima,” an unwavering hope for the abolition of nuclear
weapons and the realization of lasting world peace. On the other hand,
“Hiroshima” reminds some of Japanese aggression in the Asia-Pacific
region during World War II, such as the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor
and the Nanking Massacre. In fact, many Americans justify the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki by arguing that the
bombs hastened the end of the war, saving thousands of lives as a result.
Moreover, many Asians and Pacific islanders who lived under Japanese
colonial and military rule often claim that the atomic bombs liberated
them from Japanese aggression.
Re-membered within the space of the Hiroshima memoryscape,
which is filled with contention over the meaning of the atomic bombing,
Conjuring up Traces of Historical Violence
109
Figure 6.1 Late Spring 1972; from top left (clockwise): Grandma’s elder sister,
Grandma, Dad, my brother, myself, Mom.
those who were killed by the bombing become “martyrs for peace,”
“Japanese higaisha [victims],” or “Japanese kagaisha [aggressors].”
Torn into these subjects, jiichan [my grandpa], who was killed by the
bombing, disappears from the space of “the beloved.”
* * *
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Naono Akiko
Jiichan died about one month after the atomic bomb was dropped on
Hiroshima. He survived “damages from heat rays, shock wave and
blast, and high-temperature fires” caused by the atomic bombing, but
did not survive “the acute radiation damage.” He is one of “approximately 140,000 (error of ⫾10,000)” who were killed in Hiroshima by
the end of December 1945.2 He died of what later came to be known
as radiation sickness.
I do not recall when, but I learned that Mom, Auntie, and Grandma
are all hibakusha, survivors of the atomic bombing, and that I am a
hibaku-nisei, a second-generation atomic bomb survivor. As I read stories about the children who died from leukemia, which was believed to
be symptomatic of the “radiation sickness” caused by the bombing,
I became afraid that I might develop such sickness myself.
At an early age, I became grateful that I was alive and healthy,
although I could never eliminate completely concerns about developing some unknown radiation sickness in the future. My feeling of
gratefulness, combined with a naïve sense of justice, led me to decide
that I would dedicate myself to work for peace. This “commitment”
had long dictated how I talked to jiichan.
Because he was killed by the atomic bombing 27 years prior to my
birth, jiichan appeared to me as an absent figure. Initially, learning
about the source of his absence through familial stories told by
Mom seemed to offer me a safe and warm space to talk to jiichan. As
I searched for him, however, I began to bump into the uncanny forces
on my way: jiichan no longer appeared as a beloved figure.
Being drawn by some unknown forces, I found myself inside the
Hiroshima memoryscape. And my search for jiichan turned into a
journey through the memoryscape, without knowing exactly when this
journey had begun. Retrospectively, my first encounter with genbaku
[the atomic bomb], through recognizing jiichan’s absence, marked an
entry into the Hiroshima memoryscape. But this encounter was not
completely or deliberately my own choice. I was merely searching for
jiichan. I am not sure why I bothered to look for jiichan whom I have
never even met. Could it be that the spirits of those killed by the bombing drove me to this? A local journalist in Hiroshima, only half jokingly,
once told me, “Ms. Naono, you are possessed by hibakusha’s spirits.”
Practicing sociological imagination, this essay draws out how my
memory of jiichan came to be covered by the shadow of “the bomb”—
a sign of the violent forces that took him away from me—and how
I desperately try to rescue him from that shadow, albeit unsuccessfully,
by taking a journey through Hiroshima’s memoryscape.3 This is not a
111
story about jiichan, but it cannot be told without his absence. This is
a story about how I remember him; how I have talked to him; how my
talks to him have been shadowed by the lasting effects of “the bomb”;
and how I long for his loving presence back in the photo.
My story evolves around what is not seen and barely sensed, so it
might be called a “ghost story.” In her analysis of ghostly matters and
haunting, Avery Gordon proposes that, rather than being simply a missing or a dead person, a ghost is a sign of unresolved violence or injury
that appears to be the things of the past, “but is nonetheless alive, operating in the present, even if obliquely, even if barely visible” (Gordon
1997: 66).4 Once encountered, Gordon further argues, a ghost forces us
to recognize “the living effects, seething and lingering, of what seems
over and done with, the endings that are not over” (Gordon 1997: 195).
The theoretical approaches I use in this essay derive from Gordon’s
careful and politically enabling analysis of ghostly matters in relation
to the presence of sociohistorical violence. At the same time, I have
serious reservations about identifying jiichan’s presence as a ghost, for
the word “ghost,” or a Japanese translation of it, “yirei” or “obake,”
seems to reduce him to an objectified and impersonal figure. For me,
jiichan is my grandpa, whether he is alive or not. Part of my reservation
is connected to the very way his presence became ghostly, as I later
delineate. Moreover, those who survived the unprecedented atomic
horror use a metaphor of “yirei,” which often appears in pictures of
Buddhist hell, to describe the thousands of terribly burnt and disfigured fleeing from ground zero, for they looked “out-of-this-world.” If
I employed “yirei” to signify jiichan’s presence, that would subject
him again to the cruel death brought upon him by the bomb, which
reduced humans to inorganic creatures. As a granddaughter, I want
to rescue him from being made into “objects” and keep his warm
presence alive. But precisely because the source of his absence cannot
be separated from a troubling past, which has not passed yet, jiichan’s
presence became ghostly.
Ghost’s presence is never clearly visible, so we might wonder if it is
our imaginary creation. But a ghost is never simply a product of our
imagination or representation: it produces material effects on those
who are haunted. An encounter with a ghost, therefore, is uncomfortable at the least and can even be dangerous. Once being haunted, we
might be “grasped and hurtled into the maelstrom of the powerful and
material forces that lay claim to [us] whether [we] claim them as [ours]
or not” (Gordon 1997: 166). Yet we are haunted not simply to be
drawn into the world of ghosts. Gordon helps us recognize, with
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Naono Akiko
Benjamin’s historical materialism, a utopian possibility in the presence
of a ghost:
The monad or the ghost presents itself as a sign to the thinker that there
is a chance in the fight for the oppressed past, by which I take Benjamin
to mean that the past is alive enough in the present. . . . Benjamin goes
even further, calling on us to protect the dead from the dangers of the
present as if they were proximate enough for such loving embrace.
(Gordon 1997: 65, emphasis in the original)
In order to fight for the oppressed past, Gordon urges us that we
must endeavor to “obliterat[e] the sources and conditions that link the
violence of what seems finished with the present” (Gordon 1997: 66).
The ghost appears to you because “the dead or the disappeared or the
lost or the invisible are demanding their due” (Gordon 1997: 182).
In some cases, a response to the ghosts demanding their due might
take a form of revenge. Many of those who were killed by the bomb,
indeed, asked for revenge on “America,” as they took their last breath.
Sometimes, I cannot withhold my anger toward the United States for
willfully killing hundreds of thousands of civilians, including jiichan,
and bringing so much suffering and lasting terror of radiation to those
who survived and their offspring. Worse still, the United States continues
to justify its act in its righteous claim of having “saved lives” and insists
on the power and necessity of nuclear weapons. As it will become clear
in this essay, however, the “Enemy” takes many forms, which makes it
almost impossible to seize it and carry out my revenge. As I try to
avenge for jiichan’s death, I become more and more confused about
what I am fighting against—who the “Enemy” is.
Because I want to find “my beloved grandpa,” I follow the ghostly
presence of jiichan. By following his presence, though not always
willingly, I journey through the Hiroshima memoryscape, under the
shadow of “the bomb.”
Talking to Jiichan
“Dad was working in the house that morning. I was with Mom in a
shelter-house in Yamate, further northwest of our house [in relation to
the hypocenter]. I was in the living room after eating breakfast. There
suddenly was a big flash. Windows were shattered into pieces. And
I was thrown up in the air and then against the floor. The next thing
113
I remember is I was being held by Mom in an air raid shelter with the
neighbors. Dad came back to Yamate around 4 in the afternoon that
day. The back of his head was injured, with a piece of glass sticking in
it. It took Dad a long time to get home because he didn’t know alternative routes to get around the rivers. He just waited for the water to get
low enough to cross the rivers. He was such a hardworking man and
never played around, so he didn’t know the way around. He was the
oldest of 11 siblings, and after he graduated from elementary school, he
began working for his father. He worked hard so that he could send all
his siblings to college. He did not look badly injured. But he got really
sick. He suffered so much that he begged to be killed. One day, we were
all called beside his futon. Dad held my hand and told me to study hard
and be a good girl. But I quickly pulled my hand away. His body was
filled with purple spots. He was a very kind and warm father. He was
the only one in the family who died because of the bomb.”
Mom told me the story again and again, every time I asked her
about jiichan (Grandpa). Jiichan died on September 3, 1945, due to
acute radiation sickness. He was exposed to the bombing a mere
800 meters from ground zero.5 With his body covered in purple spots,
a typical symptom of radiation sickness, jiichan must have looked
horrifying. But at least he died under the care of his family; many died
without being reunited with their loved ones.
I am not sure how much of Mom’s story I understood when I first
heard it, given how young I was then, but by the time I finished elementary school, I had already decided to work for peace. I believed
that, as a granddaughter of a man who was killed cruelly by a nuclear
bomb, I had been assigned such a mission. As I grew up, I read many
accounts and stories about the atomic bombing. These were in
accordance with the master narrative of the bombing in Japan that
had been fully developed by the late 1970s.
In the 1980s, when I did most of my initial learning about the
bombing, the “Spirit of Hiroshima” was firmly in place.
The damage done by the A-bomb was so catastrophic that this conviction
was deeply rooted in the minds of the people of Hiroshima; humanity
cannot coexist with nuclear weapons and their use must not be allowed.
Based on this conviction—the Spirit of Hiroshima, an unwavering hope
for the abolition of nuclear weapons and the realization of lasting world
peace, the city of Hiroshima turned toward the world and began its
journey on a path to peace. (Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum, Panel
A6001 “Path to Peace”)
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Naono Akiko
“The Spirit of Hiroshima” is, though, now widely criticized as the
master narrative of Japanese victimhood, which positions the
“Japanese” as “higaisha [victims]” of the war while concealing
Japan’s colonial past and its aggression in neighboring Asia Pacific
Islands (Dower 1997; Hein and Selden 1997; Yoneyama 1999). I cherished this Spirit, with its concealing effect of Japan’s colonial past, as
my memory of Hiroshima. And this Spirit had long dictated the way
I talked to jiichan.
The primary way I talked to jiichan was through the prayer held
on every August 6—the anniversary of the bombing. At Dad’s insistence, it had become my family’s ritual to gather in front of TV about
8:00 A.M. every August 6 to watch broadcasting of the peace memorial
ceremony. As part of the ceremony, one-minute of prayer is dedicated
to the victims of the bombing at 8:15 A.M., the time the bomb was
dropped on Hiroshima. At 8:15 A.M., my family sat in front of the TV
and prayed for one minute. I talked to jiichan for one minute every
August 6, although it is not the anniversary of his death. “How are
you, jiichan? I will work for the abolition of nuclear weapons and
the realization of lasting world peace. So, watch over me from where
you are.”
My jiichan, whom I talked to every August 6, must have wished
for the abolition of nuclear weapons and lasting world peace, so that
the tragedy of Hiroshima would never be repeated. In my talks to
jiichan, colonial inequality among the victims of the atomic bombing
was erased under the “Spirit of Hiroshima.” In my talks to him, the
United States never appeared in my consciousness, although it did in
Mom’s story. “In the air raid shelter [after the bombing], I remember
this boy, about 10-year-old, with a badly injured father. The father
said to the boy, ‘I’m not going to make it. You take revenge on
America.’ ‘I will,’ the boy promised his father. I think the boy died,
though.”
My ritual of talking to jiichan was never separated from the national
ritual of commemorating Japanese victims under the guise of “universal aspirations for peace,” but I always imagined him in my consciousness as my grandpa, not a “Japanese victim,” a “national martyr,” or a
“martyr for world peace.” As I went further in my search for him,
however, my talks to jiichan began to be covered by “the bomb’s
shadow”—the living effects of violent historical forces that
appear to be the things of the past. And he began to appear as a ghostly
figure.
115
Colonial Memories
Just out of high school in the summer of 1990, I volunteered as an
interpreter for the World Conference for the Ban on A- and H-bombs
in Hiroshima, which was organized by Gensuikin [Japan National
Congress against A- and H-Bombs]. I had developed “political consciousness” and wanted to make the pilgrimage to the “mecca for
peace” to participate in the celebration for world peace, not necessarily to console the soul of jiichan or the souls of others who were killed
by the bombing.
At a preparatory meeting, I met a retiring junior-high school
teacher. He was hibakusha. Meeting this man would mark my
encounter with colonial memories in Hiroshima’s memoryscape. To
initiate a conversation, he asked me where I was from.
“I am from Nishinomiya [about 300 kilometers east of Hiroshima].”
“What made you come all the way and volunteer for this conference?”
“My mom is a hibaku-nisei from Hiroshima. And, I guess, because I am
hibaku-nisei and want to contribute to the cause of peace and antinuclear activism.”
“Your mother told you that? She is very brave. Usually, if you live away
from Hiroshima or Nagasaki, you do not tell that you are
hibakusha, even to your family, especially to the children, because
we fear discrimination.”
For a long time after the bombing, many hibakusha were subjected to
various forms of social discrimination, especially upon their employment
and marriage. The nature of the radiation aftereffects was unknown, and
many feared that hibakusha had been infected with some kind of contagious disease by inhaling “poisonous gas.”6 Many of those exposed to
high levels of radiation suffered from acute radiation sickness, the symptoms of which included hair loss, bleeding, nausea, diarrhea, and lowered counts of white blood cells. Like jiichan, even those who did not
look seriously injured by the bombing began to die in significant numbers as the fall of 1945 approached. A rumor spread throughout
Hiroshima: “Once you start bleeding and losing hair, you are finished.”
Many died because of the delayed effects caused by the bomb’s radiation.
Moreover, some nisei developed, and even died of, leukemia.7
Had it not been the nuclear bomb, jiichan would have had a much
greater chance of surviving and those seeking loved ones or giving aid
to the injured and dying in the immediate aftermath of the bombing
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Naono Akiko
would not have had to live in fear. Many came into the city to search
for their family members. Others came in as members of the rescue
and relief teams. There was no way of knowing, then, that they would
be exposed to deadly radiation. Even those who were engaged in
cremating the countless corpses were exposed to high levels of radiation. Had it not been the nuclear bomb, those “children” who were
in the wombs of mothers who were near the hypocenter at the time of
the bombing would not have developed “A-bomb microcephaly.”
I despised the bomb and its cruel lasting effects, but soon I would find
out that many hailed it for saving lives.
When I read a report regarding a citizens’ conference on Japan’s
military aggression in Asia, which was published in 1990, I encountered the “Asian” narrative of the atomic bombing—“The bomb liberated Asia from Japan’s colonial aggression.” For those who suffered
under Japan’s military occupation, the bomb ended the war and, thus,
liberated them from Japan’s aggression. The bomb killed jiichan, but
it “saved” the lives of many Asians and Pacific Islanders who might
have been killed by the Japanese troops.
Soon after this first encounter with colonial memories, I learned
about Korean hibakusha in a conversation with the junior-high school
teacher—hibakusha I met at the World Conference. He was in the
ninth grade at the time of the bombing. One hot afternoon in late
August 1990, he and I walked through the Hiroshima Peace Park. As
we walked, he described to me how he escaped from the devastation,
leaving behind his friend, who was begging for help. He guided me to
a specific place. We stood before the Memorial for the Korean Atomic
Bomb Victims, which was then located outside the Peace Park.8 This
teacher said that those most victimized by the atomic bombing were
the Korean people and that he considered himself to be their kagaisha
[victimizer]. Glancing at a visible scar left on his face by the atomic
bombing, I could not compose a single response. Until then, I had
never met any hibakusha who considered him- or herself a kagaisha.
Over the course of several conversations during the early 1990s, he
told me how he came to see himself that way.
He had received wartime imperial education. This education
resulted in his belief that a holy war was being fought to liberate Asia
from Western imperial powers. At that time, many Koreans worked at
the factory to which he had been mobilized to work as a student.
Those Koreans were made to be exposed to the atomic bombing. Had
they stayed in Korea, they would not have been killed by the bomb.
117
They were brought by the Japanese. For Asian neighbors, all Japanese
are kagaisha [aggressors]. And I am Japanese. It was hard to acknowledge my role as a kagaisha after suffering from the bombing. About
thirty years ago, I spoke about [my/Japan’s] victimizing role publicly
and met with much resistance. But after thirty years of hard work, not
many would dismiss or oppose my opinion any longer.
The Korean Association for Assistance to Victims of the Atomic
Bomb estimated that about 30,000 of the 50,000 Koreans who were
exposed to the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and 10,000 of the 20,000
Koreans exposed to it in Nagasaki died as a result of the bombing
(cited in Ichiba 2000: 27). After the colonization of the Korean peninsula by Japan in 1910, many Koreans crossed the sea to come to
Japan.9 Many of them worked in the military industrial sector during
the war for very low wages under severe conditions. At the factories of
the Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Hiroshima, for example, about
2,800 Korean men were brought as forced labor in 1944 and were
subsequently exposed to the atomic bombing (Yamada 2000: 107). In
addition to being subjected to dangerous working conditions and discrimination, these Korean workers were not paid their full, stipulated
share; at the time of “recruitment,” they were promised by Mitsubishi
that half of their wages would be sent to their families in Korea, but
that portion of their wages was never sent to the families nor paid
directly to those men (Yamada 2000: 111).10
Employing legal, economic, and cultural means, such as citizenship
laws, family registration laws, and assimilation policies, colonial inequalities between the Japanese imperial subjects and the Korean colonial subjects were produced and maintained. These inequalities coalesced in the
immediate aftermath of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
In the midst of the devastation, some Japanese refused to give medical
treatment to badly injured Koreans. Moreover, since they lacked familial
and neighborhood support networks, many Koreans remained in the
radiation-contaminated city, having nowhere to go (Ichiba 2000: 326).
According to a survey conducted by the Korean Church Women’s
Alliance in 1979, only 10 percent of the Koreans who were exposed to
the bombing took refugee in the shelters, mountains, and outskirts of
Hiroshima (cited in Iwadare and Nakajima 1999, vol. 3: 229).
After Japan’s defeat, many Korean hibakusha went back to the
peninsula. According to several testimonies of those Korean hibakusha
who returned home, there was a rumor after the war that Koreans
remaining in Japan would be killed. Many feared a recurrence of the
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Naono Akiko
mass murder of Koreans after the Great Kanto Earthquake. It is estimated that of the surviving 30,000 Korean hibakusha, 23,000 went
back while 7,000 remained in Japan (The Korean Association for
Assistance to Victims of the Atomic Bomb, cited in Ichiba 2000: 27).
Many of those who returned to the peninsula had no livelihood or
family on whom to depend. It is unknown how many of these
returnees were killed during the Korean War, but certainly their lives
were further devastated (see Ichiba 2000; The Association of Citizens
for Supporting South Korean Atomic Bomb Victims 1987, 1996).
Most of them have been silent about their experiences with the
bombing, partly because of a lack of understanding in Korea about
the aftereffects of the atomic bombing and partly due to a fear of
being labeled as “returnees from Japan,” that is, “traitors.” Upon
returning to Korea, those children who grew up in Japan during the
wartime did not understand the language and were often bullied. Even
after acquiring the language, they continued to be subjected to harsh
statements, such as “You are not Korean nor Japanese!” Many
Korean hibakusha in the peninsula died without receiving any official
support from the Korean, American, nor the Japanese government. In
1986, it was estimated that approximately 15,000 hibakusha were living in South Korea and 2,000 in North Korea (Weiner 1997: 95–96).
The number declined significantly in the following 15 years: only
2,204 were identified in South Korea in 2000 and 928 in North Korea
in 2001.11
Colonial inequality continues today. Despite the fact that neither of
Hibakusha Medical Law of 1957 nor the Hibakusha Special Measures
Law of 1968 includes any restriction on citizenship or residency, the
vast majority of hibakusha residing in the Korean peninsula, North
and South Americas, and other parts of the world have not benefited
from these measures. The Supreme Court ruling in the “Son Chintu
trial” in 1978 seemed to have opened a venue for non-Japanese
hibakusha to be eligible for medical and other relief benefits granted to
Japanese hibakusha.12 Yet, the Ministry of Health and Welfare has
refused, until the very recent court ruling, to extend these benefits to
those who reside outside Japan, citing a notification issued by the chief
of the Division of Hygiene in 1974 that the Special Measures Law
would be applicable to only those hibakusha who reside inside the
territory of Japan (cited in Tamura 1999: 511). In order to receive
the free medical care and related benefits guaranteed under the new
relief measure legislated in 1994, one must be physically present in
119
Japan, which is too expensive and physically taxing for most aged
hibakusha living abroad.13
The recent ruling at a Japanese court first appeared to make possible
the extension of the relief measures to oversea hibakusha. After years
of struggles, in December 2002, the Osaka High Court ruled in the
“Kwak Kifun trial” that the Hibakusha Relief Law of 1994 must be
extended to those hibakusha who reside outside of Japan. Stormed by
requests not to appeal to the Supreme Court by associations that
support Korean and other overseas hibakusha and concerned citizens,
the Japanese government finally gave up on appealing to the higher
court, as it always did in prior cases. The Ministry of Health, Labor
and Welfare released a statement on December 18 that the government’s decision not to appeal to the Supreme Court is made out of a
“humanitarian” concern and this decision was not delivered as a form
of state compensation. To prove its point, the government expressed
its unwillingness to extend the relief measures to those overseas
hibakusha who received the health benefit prior to 1997 or those who
have never received the hibakusha health certificate. The health certificate and related benefits can be issued only inside Japan and only
those who are granted the benefits in Japan are eligible to keep receiving the benefits after returning to their respective country of residence.14 Therefore, given the present position of the national
government, it is unlikely that the court decision will benefit most of
the aged hibakusha living outside of Japan.
* * *
When I bumped into colonial memories of Asia-Pacific, I also
began to wonder whether jiichan had been a “kagaisha [aggressor].”
Jiichan was an owner of a local tin factory. His factory, like those
in other war-related industries, was assigned the role of munitions
plant by the Japanese military-government. He, then, actively participated in Japan’s war efforts. As an active participant in the war
efforts, he was in complicity with Japan’s aggression in the Asia Pacific
region.
Jiichan was a “kagaisha” . . .
But he is my jiichan.
I am confused. I don’t know who he is anymore . . .
120
Naono Akiko
Lost in the Memoryscape, the Enemy
(Dis)appears in the Shadow
As I searched for him, I lost jiichan (Grandpa) in the Hiroshima
memoryscape or, perhaps, I got lost. After bumping into colonial
memories in the memoryscape, I soon came to face that there are many
others who celebrate the bomb. Immediately after my arrival in the
United States in January 1991, the Gulf War broke out. For the first
time in my life, I met people who viewed the dropping of a nuclear
bomb on living humans with enthusiasm. It was painful for me to
learn that many people there, too, justify the dropping of the atomic
bomb—the bomb that took away jiichan from me.
The most recent public manifestation of U.S. celebration of the
bomb occurred during the 1994–1995 controversy over the Enola
Gay exhibit at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. In
the midst of the storm of criticism leveled at the Smithsonian, the U.S.
Senate, in the fall of 1994, unanimously voted in favor of a resolution
that characterized the atomic bombing as a force that “mercifully”
ended the brutal war. The resolution even went so far as to suggest
that the bombs, by shortening the war, saved not only American but
also Japanese lives. The atomic bombs the United States dropped on
Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed 210,000 (error of ⫾20,000) human
beings by the end of December 1945. The dead included not only
jiichan and other “Japanese” civilians, but also Japan’s colonial subjects and even American citizens.15 Tremendous deaths caused by the
bomb, however, remains almost invisible in the public discourse
in the United States of the bombing. Moreover, the acts of aggression
conducted by the United States in its century-long imperial project in
the Asia Pacific region, which were both in competition and complicit
with Japanese imperialism, are absent in the U.S. narratives concerning
the bomb. To achieve its imperialist expansion in the Philippines, for
example, the United States supported Japan’s annexation of Korea.
Given this complicity, then, Korean hibakusha are victims not only of
Japanese colonialism, but also of the U.S. act of dropping the bomb
and its imperial project.
Q: “Who should bear the responsibility for the atomic bombing?”
In Seoul
42 out of 113 (37%) responded: “The Japanese government.”
68 out of 113 (60%) responded: “Both the Japanese and U.S.
governments.”
121
In the Kyongsang-Bukdo region
90 out of 151 (60%) responded: “The Japanese government.”
29 out of 151 (19%) responded: “Both the Japanese and U.S.
governments.”
“If Japan had not colonized Korea, we would have never been exposed to
the atomic bombing in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as ‘the Japanese.’ ”
(Report of the State of Hibakusha in Korea16)
As a part of the benefits granted by the Hibakusha Relief Law
passed in 1994, a 100,000-yen bond was sent to Mom. The government
bonds were issued to those hibakusha who lost family members to the
atomic bombing before March 31, 1969. The purpose of these bonds
was to offset the cost of funerals. Mom received a bond in 1994 to offset the cost of the funeral of jiichan, who died in 1945.
I was exposed to the atomic bombing as military personnel of the
Japanese army and have suffered from keloid on my arms, chest, and the
abdomen throughout my life. I strongly believe that I should be granted
the same rights as the Japanese hibakusha. . . . I am 76 and there is not
much time left in my life. Please extend the same benefits [granted to the
Japanese hibakusha] so that I can lead the remaining life in peace.
(A statement delivered at the Trial for the Hibakusha Relief Law by Kwak
Kifun, a Korean hibakusha, July 14, 200017)
Bumping into the memories of those who suffered under Japan’s
colonial rule, I have encountered the living effects of Japanese imperialism and military aggression, materialized in the willful neglect of
Korean hibakusha by the Japanese government. Given the continued
presence of colonial inequality, I have to confront the historical forces
that position jiichan and me as the “Japanese” vis-à-vis Korean
hibakusha. This partly entails acknowledging jiichan’s role as
kagaisha [aggressor] and examining the way my privilege is afforded
by the continued presence of Japanese imperialism in Asia-Pacific. But
I still cannot call jiichan “kagaisha.” Unable to call him this, I am
likely to be criticized by the Japanese leftist peace activists as lacking
“critical consciousness.”18 Even with such criticism, I still refuse to
reduce jiichan to “Japanese kagaisha,” because I want to claim him
back from the shadow of “the bomb” and offer him a hospitable space
where he can be embraced by my loving arms.
I was trying to criticize U.S. celebration of the bomb and its imperial
project in Asia-Pacific, not Japan’s colonial aggression. Why can’t I
ever solely engage in a critique of the United States, which publicly
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Naono Akiko
expresses its aspiration to maintain and strengthen its unilateral hegemony in the world by building up arsenals and attacks other states that
are suspicious of developing weapons of mass destruction? Why can’t
I solely express my rage toward U.S. military aggression and its continued justification of the use of the bomb, a weapon of mass destruction,
against a civilian population? In my condemnation of the violent force
that brought such a cruel death to jiichan, why do I constantly feel
extremely uneasy about jiichan’s position in Japanese imperialist
aggression? I was supposedly fighting against the living effects of the
violence brought by the United States. Why is it that I always fight
against that of Japan in the end? In my fight to reclaim jiichan to the
space of the beloved, the “Enemy” changes its face. If the violence
Japan inflicted in its name was the “Enemy,” is jiichan also included in
the “Enemy” because he participated in Japan’s war efforts? What does
it mean, then, for me to take revenge for jiichan’s death?
End of the Story but not the Exit of
the Memoryscape
On the fifty-sixth anniversary of the atomic bombing, I was standing
at a gas station in Hiroshima, where jiichan’s house used to stand. At
8:15 A.M., I was at a spot where jiichan supposedly was at the time of
the bombing. I did not know what to say to him anymore. I could no
longer tell him, “Please rest in peace,” or “I will work for peace.”
I desperately wanted to hear jiichan speak to me, but I heard nothing.
I went there looking for something, but I could not find anything.
* * *
In my journey through the Hiroshima memoryscape to find jiichan, he
appears to me as a ghostly figure. If I were to claim jiichan back as my
beloved grandpa, I must exorcise the ghost from his presence. An act of
exorcism, however, is not the same as silencing and domesticating the
ghost, as Avery Gordon cautions (see Gordon 1997: 205–206). If we
tried to reduce the ghost to intelligible or manageable language, such as
dichotomy between “higai [victimhood] and kagai [aggression],” it will
return to haunt us and jiichan’s presence will continue to remain ghostly.
A ghost appears to notify us that the violence that made our loved
ones disappear is still operating in the present. Therefore, exorcising a
ghost entails the labor of identifying and transforming the sociohistorical
forces that produced it, so that we can create a different future (see
123
Gordon 1997: 182–183). Unless we recognize what the ghost is signaling
to us by “reckoning with it” (Gordon 1997: 64), it remains as a specter,
wandering in the same violent conditions that made it appear in the
first place.
To claim jiichan back as my beloved grandpa, I fight the forces that
brought cruel death to him and continue to keep him in the “state of
death” by naming and claiming him as an objectified and impersonal
figure, such as “national martyr,” “precious sacrifice for peace,”
“Japanese higaisha [victim],” and “Japanese kagaisha [aggressor].” By
turning him into those objects, and thus stripping away his social
relations with the living, these forces both silence jiichan and ensure
that he remains dead. They even condition my relationship to jiichan
by subsuming me, as the remembering subject, and jiichan, as the
remembered subject, under the position of “Japanese.” But these
forces cannot determine who he is or my relationship to him; jiichan is
my grandpa whom I wish to keep alive and present.
The work of rescuing those killed by the bombing from the realm of
death is becoming increasingly urgent, as a force of the “Enemy” is
gaining power across the Pacific. At both ends of the Pacific, chauvinistic nationalisms are on the rise, such as the Japanese Society for
History Textbook Reform and the American Council of Trustees and
Alumni. These call for the promotion of heroic accounts of national
history so that “our children can be proud of being Japanese” or “our
children can be proud of being American.” The war dead, including
those killed by the atomic bombing, play an important role in this
history as “national martyrs” who sacrificed their lives for the creation or the defense of peace or freedom. Turned into “silent national
objects” (see Tomiyama 1995: 91–93), the war dead in both countries
are made to serve their respective nations even in their deaths.
Chauvinistic nationalisms in Japan and the United States greatly
contribute to the execution and concealment of state violence, such as
imperialism and war. By positioning “Japanese” and “American” war
dead as “enemies,” for example, chauvinistic nationalisms conceal the
complicity between Japanese and American imperial projects in the
Asia-Pacific region and their collaboration in the postwar period
under the Cold War system. In so doing, these nationalisms erase from
the Hiroshima memoryscape Korean atomic bomb victims who
suffered under the collaboration between Japanese and American
imperialisms and military aggression. Furthermore, together with
other forces of the “Enemy,” they attempt to lock “Japan” and “the
United States” or “Asia” into the positions of “the former enemies”
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Naono Akiko
and “new allies and partners,” while concealing complicities,
alliances, and oppositions that exceed the relations and boundaries of
the nation-state and the empire.
Even after dropping the atomic bomb and killing hundreds of thousands and brutally injuring even more, the American state continues to
kill again “the dead of August” and wound hibakusha by developing
and maintaining highly sophisticated nuclear weapons. Furthermore,
the U.S. government remains committed to using nuclear weapons,
if necessary. The March 9, 2002 edition of the Los Angeles Times
revealed secret Pentagon contingency plans to use nuclear weapons
against China, Russia, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, Libya, and Syria.
Launching military attack on Iraq, the White House refused to exclude
an option of using nuclear weapons.
The Japanese government consistently went along with Washington
and collaborated with U.S. state violence since the end of the war.
Regardless of its pledge for peace and nuclear disarmament made
public annually at the peace ceremonies of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
the national government of Japan has never, since the end of the war,
accused the United States of violating international law for using
weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations. Moreover,
even after the secret Pentagon contingency plans were revealed,
Tokyo issued no protest against Washington (see Chugoku Shimbun
2002). Rather, Tokyo continues to ally with Washington in ensuring
U.S. military dominance in the world and rely on the “American
nuclear umbrella” for the “security” of Japan and the Asia-Pacific
region.
In order to claim back jiichan as a beloved figure, I must fight
nationalism, state violence, and even jiichan’s and my complicity in
them. Fighting the “Enemy” on these fronts, however, turns out to be
very difficult. The overshadowing power of the nation-state to structure and condition our memories and emotions remains prevailing,
even in its critique, as my story demonstrates. Furthermore, my acts of
exorcism are filled with ambivalence and contradictions.
As a powerful counterblow to the “Enemy,” leftist activists and
intellectuals in Japan have identified forces of nationalism and state
violence that operate in the Hiroshima memoryscape. Moreover, they
have gone so far as to locate individuals who are responsible for
nationalism and state violence. In their identification of the responsible parties, however, leftist activists and intellectuals, in the process,
have judged Japanese dead, like jiichan, and hibakusha guilty of the
crime committed by the state; thus they name these guilty “Japanese
125
kagaisha.”19 I feel very sympathetic to leftists’ politics and ally myself
politically with them in many cases, out of a concern for social justice,
particularly in relation to those who were formerly colonized by
Japan. In spite of my alliance, though, I cannot call jiichan “kagaisha”
or judge him guilty of the crime committed by the Japanese state,
even in my awareness that he contributed to Japanese state violence.
I want him to be solely my grandpa. But he should not have to be
completely innocent for me to embrace him. Perhaps the work of
exorcism can be completed only when I can accept and love him the
way he was, without condemning him as “kagaisha” or idealizing him
as innocent. Making jiichan innocent would keep him in the state of
death by making him an ideal object of my love. Not knowing him
firsthand, however, makes it even more difficult for me not to idealize
him. Moreover, I sometimes hesitate to practice the act of exorcism,
for if the “ghost” disappeared, I am afraid that jiichan’s presence, even
though seen as absence, would not be as strongly near to me anymore.
As troubling and even unnerving as it seems, I want to remain haunted
by his ghostly presence.
Jiichan, I feel you.
But I can’t hear you.
Why did I bother to look for you?
I have never even met you.
I can’t even imagine how you sound.
How come do I want you to be my beloved, if I have
never even known you?
Jiichan, am I disturbing you?
Were you resting in peace until I started talking to you?
Am I the one who is haunting you?
Do you wanna be left alone?
Can I keep searching for you?
To offer you a hospitable memory.
Talk to me, jiichan.
Notes
I thank Neferti Tadiar and Avery Gordon for giving me critical and encouraging
feedback on the first and later drafts of this essay.
1. Chang, cited in The Association of Citizens for Supporting South Korean
Atomic Bomb Victims (1987: 147). Cited quote is my translation from
126
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
Naono Akiko
a Japanese text. All translation from Japanese to English in this essay is
mine. I received assistance from Jin-hee Lee for romanization of Korean name.
For official descriptions of the damage caused by the atomic bombing, see
City of Hiroshima–City of Nagasaki (1995).
I distinguish between “the bomb” with and without the quotation marks—the
former being a sign of both the nuclear weapon itself and the historical forces,
such as racism, fascism, and war, that made possible its use on civilians, and
the latter being the actual weapon that was used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Gordon’s theory is largely based on textual analysis of Luisa Valenzuela’s
He Who Searches and Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
The statistics of casualty in the Nishihikimido-cho neighborhood, where
jiichan was the morning of the bombing, were the following: about 80 percent
of the residents were killed instantly; about 14 percent were injured; only
6 percent were spared from injury (Hiroshima-shi 1971: 721).
Since they did not know that they were irradiated by the nuclear weapons,
many hibakusha referred to the effects of the radiation as caused by “(poisonous) gas.”
While medical studies have concluded that there is no significant effect of
radiation caused by the atomic bombing on the second-generation survivors,
there have been speculations that parents exposed to radiation would transmit
its effects to the second-generation survivors genetically. It was suspected that
the bomb’s delayed effects might have something to do with these nisei’s death.
For a detailed analysis of the Memorial for the Korean Atomic Bomb Victims,
see Yoneyama (1999).
Many came to Japan because colonial administration’s industrial and
economic policies, which recruited “cheap” Korean labor for work in Japan.
Further, these policies displaced farmers in the countryside, thus driving displaced Korean farmers and their family members to Japan, where they saw
better economic opportunities. Yet others were brought to Japan because of
the program of forced labor beginning in 1939 (Weiner 1997; Ichiba 2000:
199–201). For a detailed study of the migration of Koreans under the
Japanese colonial rule, see Weiner (1994).
In December 1995, six Koreans who worked for Mitsubishi as “forced labor”
and were subsequently exposed to the bombing filed an action in the
Hiroshima Regional Court against Mitsubishi and the Japanese national government. In following August, 40 more joined the suit. In March 1999, the
Court judged the Japanese government and Mitsubishi not guilty; subsequently, the plaintiffs appealed against a decision to the Hiroshima High
Court in April 1999. Between the filing of the suit in 1995 and the delivery of
the decision in 1999, six of the plaintiffs passed away.
⬍http://www.chugoku-np.co.jp/abom/02abom/zaigai/index.html⬎.
Son, a Korean hibakusha, illegally entered Japan in 1970 and demanded that
he should be issued a hibakusha health certificate. After being denied the
heath certificate, Son brought the case before the Fukuoka Regional Court in
1972 and fought until the victory at the Supreme Court in 1978. See The
Korean Association for Assistance to Victims of the Atomic Bomb (2000).
127
13. Even those Korean hibakusha who remained in Japan have mostly been
neglected as “second-class citizens.” Although Koreans were forced to
become “Japanese imperial subjects” under Japan’s colonial rule and to
fight as “the Japanese” during the war, they were stripped of Japanese
citizenship and legally positioned as resident aliens in 1952. Even those
who are born in Japan are given legal status of “resident aliens” and
subjected to oppressive legal and administrative practices as well social
discrimination.
14. The 1957 Medical Law defined hibakusha as those who fell under any of
the following four categories: (1) those directly exposed to the explosion of
the atomic bomb in the areas of Hiroshima city and its specified outskirts;
(2) those who entered into the specified areas in the city and its outskirts from
the time of the bombing to August 20, 1945; (3) those irradiated by engaging
in rescue operations, cremating corpses, and other activities; and (4) fetuses of
those who fall under categories (1) through (3). In order to obtain a
hibakusha health certificate, an applicant must submit documentation, which
proves that the applicant falls under one of the four categories set under the
law. If no documentation is available, an applicant can submit the witness
accounts by two people besides his or her immediate family. If two witness
accounts are not available, an applicant can submit his or her own testimony
detailing the circumstance after the atomic bombing. In actual practice, however, if an applicant only provides his or her own testimonial account, a certificate is usually denied. After 60 years since the time of the bombing, it is
extremely difficult to find two witnesses; therefore, it is getting harder and
harder to obtain the health certificate.
15. There were several American POWs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
but most Americans who were killed or wounded by the bombing were
Japanese Americans. For a memoir of a pilot of the B-24 plane Lonesome
Lady, who was captured and brought to Hiroshima as POW, but spared from
the bombing because he was sent to Tokyo a few days prior to the attack
on Hiroshima, see Cartwright (2002). For accounts of those Japanese
American hibakusha who came back to the United States after the war, see
Sodei (1997).
16. Cited in Ichiba (2000: 115).
17. As described in the text, the Osaka High Court ruled in December 2002 that
the benefit granted under the Hibakusha Relief Law must be extended to
Mr. Kwak.
18. During my fieldwork for my master’s paper and dissertation in the late 1990s
and early 2000s, I have met several peace activists who hailed those hibakusha
who can face their role of aggression during the war, but condemned those
others who “are unable to go beyond their own suffering” for having developed “little critical consciousness.”
19. It should be stressed that these leftist activists and intellectuals make a firm
distinction, in terms of the degree of war responsibility, between those who
were in the high positions of the military-government and the civilians and the
rank-and-file soldiers.
128
Naono Akiko
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Remembering the Bomb in America and Japan.” In Laura Hein and Mark
Selden, eds., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural Conflicts
in the Nuclear Age, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1997, 3–36.
Hiroshima-shi
. The Damage of Hiroshima Caused by the Atomic Bombing
(5 volumes) 5 , Hiroshima: Hiroshima-shi
, 1971.
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Ichiba Junko
. Bringing Hiroshima Back to Their Homeland
, Tokyo: Gaifu Sha
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Sodei, Rinjiro. “Were We the Enemy? American Hibakusha.” In Laura Hein and
Mark Selden eds., Living with the Bomb: American and Japanese Cultural
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7
“The Face Value of Dreams”: Gender,
Race, Class, and the Politics
of Cosmetic Surgery
Why is the woman in the photograph covering three-quarters of
her face? Only parts of her eyes, eyebrows, and forehead are visible
(figure 7.1). At first glance, it seems as though she is guarding against
hazardous fumes, covering her nose and mouth. Her overall countenance is one of pain, and one suspects that she is perhaps crying.
In fact, the person in the photo, 26-year-old Ana Ponce, is covering
her face because she has just received a nose job for the “bargainbasement” price of $300. The photograph appeared in a 1998 San
Jose Mercury News article entitled “The Face Value of Dreams: Bogus
Plastic Surgeons Lure Peru’s Poor With Cheap Promise of Better Life,”
authored by Associated Press journalist David Koop. According to the
article, like Ponce, 22-year-old Maria Espichan (not pictured) awaits
her turn to “straighten her curved nose” while Patricia Lira, 33 (also
not pictured), expresses her desire for a fifth operation even after a
series of surgically related nasal complications.
With high hopes of altering or erasing the racial/ethnic markers
associated with the “unstraightened” nose, Ponce, Espichan, and Lira,
like hundreds of poor, indigenous and mestiza women in Peru, are
turning toward plastic surgery to exchange a nose historically racialized in negative terms for one deemed more “beautiful” by the dominant “white” culture in Peru. As the newspaper article for which the
photo was taken reports, “[m]ore than 80% of Peruvians are either
Indians or mestizo and suffer discrimination at the hands of a lightskinned wealthy elite. Job offers in newspapers demand a ‘good
132
Figure 7.1 Ana Ponce exits a plastic surgeon’s office in Lima, Peru after undergoing
rhinoplasty.
presence’ which sociologists say is code for a non-Indian appearance”
(21A). “ ‘I know my life is going to improve when I look better. . . . A
lot of my friends have had plastic surgery and now have boyfriends
and jobs,’ ” says Espichan (21A). However much a solution to Ponce’s,
Espichan’s, and Lira’s economic situations, these women, like countless of others, make themselves susceptible to these painful and risky
surgical procedures, not necessarily with the end result of looking less
indigenous per se but rather as a means of accessing the benefits of
socioeconomic power associated with the increasing importation and
value of Western beauty ideals.
In this essay, I examine the ways in which institutionalized sexist,
racist, and classist ideologies and practices under heteronormative
patriarchal capitalist societies make cosmetic surgery, by and large,
not a choice but an economic necessity for many Third World women1
in Peru and elsewhere in the Americas. While recognizing that plastic
surgery can function as an enabling science and healing practice—as in
the case of reconstructive surgery for female patients who undergo
mastectomies—my analysis focuses exclusively on “elective” cosmetic
surgical procedures, particularly those under which a patient’s
The Politics of Cosmetic Surgery
133
racial/ethnic features can be altered or transformed. Arguing that the
industry is part and parcel of gender, racial, and class-based systems of
domination, I begin with a general discussion on the political implications of cosmetic surgery. Second, I analyze how postmodern,
“celebratory” discourses of cosmetic surgery—for example, those
appearing in fashion magazine advertisements and medical books—
contribute to the effacement of historical asymmetrical power relations that create and normalize dominant Western beauty standards.
Third, I look at the ways in which women whose bodies have been
historically constructed (in all aspects, e.g., legal, social, and/or
biological) as racially “other” and in opposition to “whiteness” use
cosmetic surgery as a means toward accessing employment, marriage,
social legitimacy, and/or heterosexual desire. I argue that a more
“beautiful” face—“beautiful” according to racist, Western standards
of feminine beauty—offers women like Ponce the possibility for
socioeconomic mobility and power. Lastly, I perform a close reading
of the photo-image of Ponce, looking specifically at the ways in which
the photograph, like the news article that accompanies it, portrays
Peruvian women as passive victims rather than active agents. I argue
that the ideological narratives contained within this U.S.-produced
photographic and textual narrative perpetuate and participate in the
social construction and subordination of “Third World” women.
* * *
The relationship between imposed standards of beauty on women and
the sexual division of labor is by far anything but new and, in fact, has
been widely assessed and discussed by feminist critics. Naomi Wolf, for
example, in her bestseller, The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty
are Used Against Women, critically analyzes patriarchal capitalism and
the ways in which cultural constructions of feminine beauty function as
a way of sustaining and naturalizing the widespread underpayment of
women’s labor. She discusses how women are doubly affected by dominant standards of beauty in that not only are their wages kept at a low
but also women are expected to keep up with the high costs of maintaining a more youthful, wrinkle-free, and/or slender appearance—this,
in an effort to remain competitive in the job market. For example, it
is not uncommon for professional/working women, particularly in
the corporate world or entertainment, media, and sex industries, to
undergo liposuction, facelifts, collagen or Botox injections, or other
such measures to maintain their jobs and/or secure promotions.
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Yet, while the implications of gender and class surrounding feminine beauty norms and the cosmetic surgery industry have been extensively studied and documented, less analyzed are the ways in which
feminine constructions of beauty are tied to a racial politics. As feminist scholar Eugenia Kaw notes in her essay, “ ‘Opening’ Faces: The
Politics of Cosmetic Surgery and Asian American Women,” the maledominated industry of cosmetic surgery thrives on and depends upon
Western notions of beauty that are not only sexist and classist but also
inherently racist. Drawing attention to the commodification of double
eyelid surgery among Asian American women, Kaw points to the ways
in which cosmetic surgery is hardly race-neutral in that, more often
than not, becoming more “beautiful” for women of color translates
into having their racial/ethnic features “softened” or “reduced.” For
example, unlike the surgical alterations generally sought out by White
women, which tend to revolve around maintaining a youthful face as
well as slender and/or voluptuous bodily appearance, Kaw observes
that those sought out by women of color are frequently informed by
their desires to change or erase facial features predominantly associated with a particular racial/ethnic (nonwhite) phenotype. In an effort
to achieve a more Westernized look, African Americans, she notes,
often “opt for lip and nasal reductions [while] Asian Americans more
often choose to insert an implant on their nasal dorsum for a more
prominent nose or undergo double-eyelid surgery . . . [to] make the
eye appear wider” (243).
Yet, as Kaw highlights, women of color’s efforts at softening their
racial/ethnic features are often informed by socioeconomic reasons
and, as such, directly tied to a class politics of beauty. Her analysis
points to the ways in which, at least for many of the Asian American
female subjects interviewed, “looking like a Caucasian is almost essential for socioeconomic success” (254). In fact, one interviewed woman
in her study noted that, “ ‘[e]specially if you go into business . . . you
kind of have to have a Western facial type and you have to have like
their features’ ” (254). Arguing that “these surgeries are a product of
society’s racial ideologies, and for many of the women in my study, the
surgeries are a calculated means for socioeconomic success” (256),
Kaw’s ethnographic study and research are important in that they
underscore the intersecting gender, race, and class implications of dominant beauty norms and, specifically, cosmetic surgery. Ascribing to
these racialized feminine standards of beauty through surgical means,
she adds, allows many women of color access to forms of class mobility that they might otherwise be denied. Feminist scholar Kathryn
Pauly Morgan echoes these observations in her essay, “Women and the
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Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the Colonization of Women’s Bodies,”
pointing to the ways in which many Jewish, Asian, and Black women’s
decisions to alter their racial/ethnic features are predominantly
informed by their “hopes of better job and marital prospects” (36).
Given that cosmetic surgery is a profitable, multimillion-dollar
industry, it should come to no surprise that both the medical establishment and the media downplay the politics behind the reification
and marketing of the standardization of Western beauty ideals. As
feminist critic Pippa Brush writes, “ ‘new’ and ‘different’ body images
are being presented to women as just so many available commodities
through advertising by the industries with a stake in the beauty business” (“Metaphors of Inscription: Discipline, Plasticity and the
Rhetoric of Choice” 40). Adding to Brush’s observations, Susan Bordo
in her essay, “ ‘Material Girl’: The Effacements of Postmodern
Culture,” discusses the need to be cautious of discourses and slogans
that promote cosmetic surgery on, what she calls, “celebratory” postmodern grounds. Bordo signals the ways in which these types of
purely positive takes on cosmetic surgery—that is, those that support
surgical alterations on the basis that women have a “choice,” and that
cosmetic surgery allows for transgressive, multiple subjectivities
and/or for the (re)creation of the self and body—while not entirely dismissible, efface the historical asymmetrical power relations between,
for example, women and men and/or White women and women of
color. In other words, they fail to take into consideration how historical constructions of difference—and the ways in which those differences are constructed as inferior and in opposition to dominant
(White, Western, male, heterosexual, young, upper class, educated,
Christian, etc.) standards—deeply influence women’s reasons for
undergoing surgical transformations.
Moreover, such “celebratory” takes on cosmetic surgery occur not
just at the level of popular magazines and advertisements but also
scholarly essays. Feminist critic Kathy Davis, for example, suggests in
her essay “Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist
Approaches to Beauty” that women’s decisions to undergo cosmetic
surgery are not necessarily informed by their desires to be more beautiful per se but rather to be “ordinary.” According to Davis, it is up to
each woman at the individual level to decide what about her body is
“normal” or “deviant” (37). Thus if a woman experiences a “particular part of her body as hateful, disgusting, and beyond what she should
have to endure” (37), she may decide to surgically alter it in order to
acquire a more “normal” or “ordinary” appearance. Although Davis
carefully highlights the ways in which cosmetic surgery is both an
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oppressive problem as well as a liberating solution to women’s lives,
her analysis largely focuses on the positive, beneficial aspects of cosmetic surgery, arguing that cosmetic surgery enables women in that
there is pleasure involved in the way a woman looks and feels about
herself—for instance, getting a breast enhancement might lead to a
woman’s greater sexual pleasure and/or self-esteem. Furthermore, she
writes that cosmetic surgery “might be a way for some women within
the limitations of their present situation to end their suffering. When
viewed against this backdrop, the decision could conceivably become a
moment of triumph—a moment when a woman turns the tables and
does something for herself” (22).
While such arguments are not without merit, Davis fails to discuss
who determines what constitutes so-called normalcy or, to use her
term, ordinariness when she argues that cosmetic surgery is “the right
to an ordinary appearance, the right to happiness and well-being”
(38). As far as many women might be concerned, sagging breasts and
wrinkles could very well be deemed “ordinary,” contrary to dominant
beauty norms. Additionally, Davis’s arguments seem to imply that
there is such a thing as an “unordinary” appearance. Although Davis
acknowledges the ways in which “unequal power relations between
the sexes” (25) and “structures of domination such as racism, classism, ageism, ableism, and homophobia” (26) commonly inform
women’s demands for surgical transformations, ironically, she often
speaks from within the very ideological frameworks that legitimize
dominant beauty ideals, as the following passage illustrates:
I am frequently asked whether the women I interview need cosmetic
surgery. In other words, are they “really” ugly enough to merit such
drastic measures?. . . In fact, I usually can’t even tell what the offending
feature is . . . . Once I know what the problem is, I am usually
astounded that anyone would consider cosmetic surgery for what seems
to me to be a minor imperfection. (36)
By implying that there is such a thing as being “ugly enough” and/or
having “offending features” or “minor imperfections,” such arguments
legitimate and naturalize culturally accepted beauty ideals from which
all peoples’ physical appearances are measured. Davis furthermore
writes: “It is often suggested to me that women do cosmetic surgery for
men. This rests on the belief that no woman in her right mind could do
such a thing for herself” (34). Again, this statement (however well
intended) oversimplifies the reasons that influence women to feel
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“inferior” or “ugly” in the first place. While it is true that many women
undergo surgery for socioeconomic reasons as opposed to doing it “for
men,” we might inquire why economic success is aligned with beauty
standards in the first place. Is it even possible for a woman to get cosmetic surgery “for herself,” given the asymmetrical gender, race, and
class power relations? And, what about increasingly competitive job
markets, especially in economically volatile places like Peru?
While I agree that we should be able to explain cosmetic surgery
without “undermining the women who choose to undergo it” (Davis
23) and that cosmetic surgery is a complex issue that should not be
solely explained in reductionist, negative terms, critical takes on the
subject must nonetheless assess and take into account historical uneven
relations of power. This becomes especially important when analyzing
women of color’s desires for “straighter” noses or “bigger” eyelids.
For this matter, I find it useful to revisit the Marxist concepts of usevalue and exchange-value.2 For example, there is no difference
between the use-value of the “straight” and the “curved” nose—they
both allow us to breath and smell as well as perform other functions
that are essential for human life. Similarly, eyesight is not diminished
nor restrained by eye/lid size. The difference between a “curved” and a
“straight” nose rests on the culturally determined (and therefore arbitrary) exchange-value given to one nose over another. Given that it was
the Europeans who conquered and colonized Native peoples in the
Americas and not the other way around, it seems historically congruent that a nose more aligned with what some would call “Caucasian
physiognomy”3 would be allotted greater cultural currency—that is to
say, more value and worth as the title of “The Face Value of Dreams”
suggests. This is especially the case in Peru where strong racial divides
are not only commonplace but also deeply institutionalized.
With the effects of global capitalism and the growing importation of
Western trends—particularly from the United States and European
nations to Third World countries—it would be seemingly difficult to
argue that the historical legacies of conquest, colonialism, capitalism,
and imperialism play no part in women’s decisions, particularly Third
World women’s decisions, to undergo forms of cosmetic surgery.
Understanding the political implications of cosmetic surgery entails
comprehending the ways in which the industry is both part and parcel
of these larger, global systems of domination. Much in the same way as
economic, social, and political systems of domination have historically
necessitated and depended upon the invention and reification of racist
ideologies,4 the industry of cosmetic surgery relies on the naturalization
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of not only a sexist logic but also a racist one. Patriarchal capitalism,
for example, depends upon the labor exploitation of not just women
but, increasingly, Third World women. As such, without the institutionalization of racism and other intersecting systems of oppression,
the idea that there is such a thing as a more “beautiful” or “desirable”
nose would probably not exist.
In fact, as scholars Sander L. Gilman and Elizabeth Haiken note in
their respective studies on cosmetic surgery, deep and disturbing parallels exist between the historical rise and acceptance of cosmetic (or
aesthetic) surgery and the racial sciences of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries.5 They note that, just as the racial sciences—for
example, eugenics (the “science” and movement of racial betterment)—
became largely discredited following World War II and the Nazi fiasco,
cosmetic surgery became more widely accepted, becoming part of the
established, respectable medical profession. Both authors concur
that such wide acceptance is intimately tied to the racial sciences in that
the latter gave rise to not only the belief in “races” but also the belief in
“superior” versus “inferior” races—the White/Caucasian race being
the more beautiful and superior and the Black/Negroid race being the
most nonaesthetic and primitive. While other races were identified,
none bore the physical and mental superior capacities of the Caucasian
race. With the rise and fall of eugenics, cosmetic surgery offered an alternative and acceptable medical method of “cleansing” and “purifying”
racial/ethnic phenotype (as opposed to previous efforts at targeting
the genotype). Thus rather than dealing with racial stigmas like “too
small” or “too large” of a nose, individuals were offered the possibility
of altering or erasing socially constructed markers of racial difference
via cosmetic surgery, enabling them to potentially “pass” as an “invisible” (or “ordinary,” to use Davis’s term) member into the desired
racial/ethnic, cultural, class, and/or national group. As Haiken writes,
“the long tradition of the ‘sciences of the race’ looms large” (208) in the
discourse of cosmetic surgery, whereby Black, Native, and other
so-called racial/ethnic faces are scientifically measured against more
“beautiful,” “aesthetic” Caucasian ones.
One has but to look at, for example, W. Earle Matory’s medical
book Ethnic Considerations in Facial Aesthetic Surgery, which contains multiple before and after cosmetic surgery photographs, to notice
that first, most of the rhinoplasty (nose) and blepharoplasty (double
eyelid) patients photographed in the book are women, specifically
women of color; and second, the facial alterations achieved resemble a
more or less Caucasian physiognomy. That these women seem to be
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undergoing a phenotype “whitening” process is evidenced not just by
the photographs themselves but also the author’s written narrative
assumptions. Illustrated with facial sketches that contain geometric
formulas and graphs, the book “scientifically” purports to measure
“ethnic” peoples’ faces in relation to more “balanced,” “symmetrical,”
and “aesthetic” Caucasian ones. Hence in the before and after pictures,
“asymmetries” are “corrected” as “big” noses become “smaller,”
“curved” noses become “straighter,” and “excess flaring” of the nostrils is reduced. By the same token, single eyelids are replaced with the
more “aesthetic” double eyelids, which, according to Matory, is done
“with the goal of achieving eyelid symmetry” (271). Yet, the book is
pregnant with contradiction. For example, on the one hand Matory
writes that “it is the European–American depiction of beauty that dominates varied cultural perspectives” (11), yet on the other hand he states
that “[i]t would be erroneous to assume that the popularity of the
double eyelid operation is related solely to Western influence. Asian
cultures have long regarded the bright-eyed look associated with the
double eyelid as an aesthetically desirable feature” (267–268).
Statements like these, which appear sporadically throughout the book,
once again situate cosmetic surgery in an historical vacuum, as if desiring “the bright-eyed look” bore no connection to, for example, colonialism, racism, global capitalism, and class struggle, and, related to all
of the above, the rising importation of Western beauty ideals.
When we critically look at the sexist, racist, and class-based dimensions underlying the cosmetic surgery industry, we can begin to see, as
Bordo, Kaw, Morgan, Brush, and other feminist scholars have done,
that the industry both contributes to as well as is a product of the
larger systems of domination of which Colette Guillaumin, David
Theo Goldberg, and other feminist and/or cultural critics speak.6 As
Rosemary Gillespie, Sandra Bartky, and others note, cosmetic surgery
is first and foremost an industry of patriarchal capitalism that directly
contributes to the subordination of women—sexual, racial, economic,
or otherwise.7
In fact, like Gilman’s and Haiken’s respective research linking
cosmetic surgery to the racial sciences, Morgan points to the ways in
cosmetic surgery—and the growing demands and pressures on women
to succumb to excruciatingly painful medical procedures—is a direct
extension of the historical medicalization of women’s bodies:
The history of Western science and Western medical practice is not altogether a positive one for women. As voluminous documentation has
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shown, cell biologists, endocrinologists, anatomists, sociobiologists,
gynecologists, obstetricians, psychiatrists, surgeons, and other scientists
have assumed, hypothesized, or “demonstrated” that women’s bodies
are generally inferior, deformed, imperfect, and/or infantile. (39)
Adding to Morgan’s observations, Gillespie highlights the ways in
which, although the widely circulated illusion exists that these oppressive systems and prevailing attitudes toward women have successfully
been eradicated (especially in the “first world”), and that women are
now free and liberated, women’s bodies continue to be pathologized,
controlled, and disciplined through “simulation, consumption, and
normalising ideals of beauty, physical appearance and shape, by which
women’s social value has come to be judged” (73). Indeed, as feminist
critic Adrian Howe notes in her research on women in prison, Punish
and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality, there are real,
material consequences for women who deviate gendered norms, for
instance, they may be locked up, refused job success and/or entry into
the marriage market.8 In fact, Morgan suggests that as cosmetic surgery becomes more of the norm and less of the extraordinary, “women
who refuse to submit to the knives and to the needles, to the anesthetics and the bandages, will come to be seen as deviant in one way or
another” (40). What we are experiencing, she argues, is “a normalization of elective cosmetic surgery” (28; italics in original). Certainly this
is evidenced in the recent explosion of television shows in the U.S. that
sensationalize cosmetic surgery, for example, The Swan, Nip and
Tuck, and MTV’s I Want a Famous Face.
For Brush, cosmetic surgery, is “a disciplinary regime . . . of cultural
standards for the body [that] constructs an illusory ‘rhetoric of
choice’ . . . enforcing the inscription of ‘willing’ female bodies through
the construction of desire for the ‘perfect body’ ” (24). Borrowing from
Michel Foucault’s idea that the body as an “inscribed surface of events,”
she highlights the ways in which cosmetic surgery figuratively and literally imprints dominant social values onto women’s “willing” bodies:
Giving this metaphor of inscription literal significance points to how
changing the body can write cultural values directly on to the body of the
“willing” female subject . . . The metaphor of inscription becomes
alarmingly literal as the surgeon’s knife carves socially endorsed yet
essentially arbitrary ideals of beauty on to the plastic bodies of women
who “choose” to conform more closely to the norms of ideals society
constructs, effacing the material reality of women’s bodies for the sake of
conforming to one of a limited set of culturally specific inscriptions. (24)
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As Brush observes, the process of inscribing or “carving” value onto
women’s bodies is very much a real, material experience. Thus the
surgeon’s knife to which Brush refers points to the ways in which
women’s bodies are carved both by socially constructed beauty
norms—endorsed by both the selling doctor as well as the buying
patient—and the actual process of cosmetic surgery itself which
involves the physical, literal cutting up of women’s bodies.
Notwithstanding the pain, blood, and swelling involved in having
one’s body physically opened, more often than not, advertisements for
or articles on cosmetic surgery—for example, those which circulate in
fashion-beauty magazines—focus on the gains and “improved,” pleasurable results of surgery while de-emphasizing the medical risks and
complications that can occur. As one article reports:
Slick marketing campaigns make it easy to think of cosmetic surgery as
just another off-the-shelf consumer product, its purchase about on a par
with buying a new computer system. But surgery is surgery. There is
pain. Recovery can be lengthy and uncomfortable. Moreover, “there
can be complications of anesthesia, infection, bleeding and unfavorable
scars,” says Ross Rudolph, head of plastic surgery. (Doug Podolsky,
“The Price of Vanity” par. 5)
As Brush highlights, however, precisely because cosmetic surgery is a
capitalist industry whose profits rely on commodifying and selling
“ideal” bodies and faces, these painful considerations are often overlooked in advertisements, as providing the gruesome details of the
process could dissuade many potential buyers. She writes that while “the
bruises and the swelling are as much a part of the process as the operation or the finished ‘product’[,]. . . . [i]t is in the best interests of surgeons
and theorists alike to efface the materiality of the process” (34).9
Considering that pain is something that often gets glossed over in
most discussions about and advertisements for cosmetic surgery, one
has to wonder why pain is significantly emphasized in “The Face
Value of Dreams,” both in the news article as in the accompanying
photo-image of Ponce. We might ask why pain is such a central issue
in this textual and photographic narrative but not an issue in, say, for
example, the San Jose Mercury News’ coverage of Paula Jones’s10 new
nose (“People in the News”)? Appearing six months after “The Face
Value of Dreams,” coverage of Jones’s surgery—reportedly paid for by
an “anonymous donor”—is discussed in a matter-of-fact sort of way,
and Jones’s new nose is described as “shorter, straighter, slightly
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upturned and more or less cute as a button” (2A). Before and after
photos of Jones are provided, with Jones glaring downward and
appearing sad-like in the “before” shot while looking straight ahead
and appearing confident and content in the “after” shot. There is no
mention or indication of the surgical process involved in the alteration
of her nose, and we do not see pain in the photos nor do we read about
the surgical knives in the article. Bandages do not cover Jones’s nose as
they do Ponce’s in “The Face Value of Dreams,” and this representation of Ponce, wherein pain is brought centrally into focus, merits
interrogation.
Ponce, who takes up half of the photo, is covering most of her face
with a white cloth, and there appear to be bandagings of the nose
underneath the cloth. Her expression is one of pain, and we can barely
see Ponce’s eyes, which avert the camera. In fact, we do not know if
the subject is even aware that her photograph is being taken. In their
analysis of National Geographic visual representations, Catherine
Lutz and Jane Collins suggest that averted gazes that “run off into the
distance beyond the frame” can “portray either a dreamy, vacant,
absent-minded person or a forward looking, future-oriented, and
determined one” (“The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes: The
Example of National Geographic” 372). In the case of Ponce, the former as opposed to the latter seems to be the case. According to Lutz
and Collins, this type of “vacant” gaze often gives subjects “a disconnected and unfocused look” (372). Ponce’s photograph, aside from
connoting vacancy or absentmindedness, depicts not “a forward looking, future-oriented, and determined” person but one who is suffering
and under a significant amount of pain.
Unlike in the photos of Jones, pain is what we see in the photograph
of Ponce’s face. We do not see before and after shots as we do in the
case of Jones as well as most cosmetic surgery ads. Instead, what we
see in Ponce’s photograph is that which usually remains hidden from
view: the “in-between” phase—that is to say, the unrepresentable
phase that lies in-between the before and after stages of cosmetic surgery. In fact, aside from the article’s negative racialization of indigenous noses, we do not know what Ponce’s nose looks like at all, having
no notion of what it might have looked like before and/or after (healing from) surgery. Since we know that Ponce has just emerged from
the surgeon’s office, we can assume that the nose that lies beneath the
bandages is nowhere near healing—probably a most unfavorable,
bloody sight—which must therefore be kept hidden from view.
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While the media in the United States often assuages the pain and
medical risks involved in local cosmetic surgical practices, curiously,
when it comes to cosmetic surgery performed in the “third world,” the
U.S. media seems to make it a point hyper-sensationalize the pain and
medical risks involved in the process. During the same year “The Face
Value of Dreams” was published, for instance, the San Jose Mercury
News printed another article on cosmetic surgery in the “third world,”
entitled “Woman Dies After Inexpensive Plastic Surgery: Dominican
Republic Clinic Has Reputation as Quick and Cheap.” The article,
authored by Associated Press journalist Michelle Faul, begins in the
following sensationalized manner: “All she wanted was shapelier legs.
Two weeks later she was dead.” No doubt, by isolating these events as
specifically “third world” surgical fiascoes, the media creates the illusion that these painful procedures and medical complications are
strictly “third world” phenomena, reinforcing an “us” (“first world”)
and “them” (“third world”) binary. The (false) assumption seems to
be that these surgical complications do not occur in the scientifically,
medically, and technologically advanced “first world.”11 Furthermore,
many of these type of sensationalized articles, for example another one
entitled “Mexico Puts on a Foreign Face: To Look More ‘American,’
They Opt for a Poor Man’s Nose Job,” written by journalist Katherine
Ellison and also published by the San Jose Mercury News, fail to link
“third world” women’s efforts to look more “American” to issues of
class struggle.
Lutz and Collins moreover suggest that photo-images of Third
World peoples in National Geographic (or other such magazines
and/or newspapers that circulate in the United States) perform a
specific ideological purpose and function:
[their] efficacy lies not so much in facilitating social control of those
photographed but in representing these others to an audience of “nondeviants” who thereby acquire a language for understanding themselves
and the limits they must live within to avoid being classed with those on
the outside. . . . The magazine’s gaze at the Third World operates to represent it to an American audience in ways which can but do not always
shore up a Western cultural identity or sense of self as modern and
civilized. (366)
Such photographs, they argue, reinforce the “us” and “them” difference, prompting the “that is not me” response from its First World
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audiences. By the same token, feminist critic Chandra Talpade
Mohanty writes that, “[w]ithout the overdetermined discourse that
creates the third world, there would be no (singular and privileged)
first world. . . . I am suggesting, in effect, that the one enables and sustains the other” (“Under Western Eyes” 74; italics in original). In fact,
Mohanty suggests that dominant representations of Third World
women ideologically create and naturalize what she calls the “average
third-world woman”:
This average third-world woman leads an essentially truncated life
based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being
“third world” (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, tradition-bound, religious, domesticated, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is
in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of Western women as
educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the “freedom” to make their own decisions. (56)
Considering the San Jose Mercury News’ positive coverage of
Jones’s nose job, one can certainly identify a photographic and textual
narrative wherein Jones is represented as the educated Western woman
of which Mohanty speaks—a woman who is professional and modern
and, consequently, has agency and control over her body and sexuality.
After all, we might add, we are talking about the woman who filed a
sexual harassment federal civil suit against Bill Clinton, former
President of the United States. Although the media seldom favorably
depicted Jones during her civil suit, the San Jose Mercury News’ coverage of her surgery and new nose is done in a positive light. By sharp
contrast, Ponce’s photograph emits a narrative quite the opposite of the
one we find in Jones’s. For one, Ponce’s surgery is not naturalized as it
is in the coverage of Jones’s. We see nothing wrong or unusual with
Jones’s new nose and/or her decision to undergo cosmetic surgery. In
fact, we see nothing wrong with the fact that her nose was paid for an
anonymous (possibly male) donor (a point which seriously calls into
question the extent to which Jones has “control” over her own body).
The photos themselves (a sad “before” look versus a confident “after”
look) and the accompanying article seem to speak approvingly of
Jones’s new nose, which is said to be comparable to “the ‘Pretty
Woman’ look” (2A). Not only does Ponce’s photograph, by contrast,
conform to representations of the “average third-world woman” (poor,
victimized, unemployed,12 ignorant, etc.) but it also carries within it
narratives of deviancy, abnormality, perversion, and horror.
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Because of where Ponce is standing (to the right) and because of the
subject’s positioning of arms and hands (close to and/or touching the
sides of the face), Ponce’s photo-image bears striking resemblance to
Edvard Munch’s infamous painting “The Scream”—a haunting representation that evokes madness, terror, fear, anxiety, and pain. In the
background and to the left of Ponce we see a dingy building, which
according to the newspaper article, is the “bogus” plastic surgeon’s
office from which Ponce has just emerged. This windowless, rundown
“office”—described as a place in which “risk[s] of infection, disfigurement and even death” occur (21A)—is indicative of the Third World
metonymical space in which Ponce lives: a far away location photographically and textually marked by unruliness, dirtiness, infection,
disease, peril, underdevelopment, excess poverty, and a lack of professional medical expertise. The news article reports furthermore that
“[f]our operations later, [Lira’s] nose is too small for her face and one
nostril is visibly larger than the other. After the first surgery her nose
was flat ‘like a boxer’s’ and after the third her nose collapsed, with
loose skin dangling in front. Despite those precedents, Lira wants a
fifth operation” (21A). No doubt such descriptions, coupled with the
photo of the dingy building from which a painfully bandaged Ponce
emerges, also evoke a Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde narrative whereby the
surgeon’s makeshift office becomes a dark, mysterious space in which
monstrosities occur—a dangerous place where poor, docile women are
“lured” (as the subtitle of the article suggests) by evil pseudo-doctors,
becoming disfigured and deformed. While we do not know what lies
beneath the white cloth/bandages covering Ponce’s face, we can guess
that whatever is hidden from view must certainly be a most frightening, unpleasant, and terrifying sight.
One can interpret Ponce’s hiding of her face in several ways. The
most obvious, literal reading is that she is hiding the unrepresentable,
gruesome “in-between” phase of cosmetic surgery—that is to say,
she is hiding the recently performed surgical inscriptions on her nose:
the blood, the open wound, the swelling, and so forth. Yet, one can also
read Ponce’s hiding of her face in a metaphorical, figurative sense, suggesting that the white cloth/bandages that cover Ponce’s face symbolically point to the whitening process of cosmetic surgery. For example,
just as the surgical knives alter and/or erase the racial/ethnic markers
associated with the “unstraightened” nose, the white cloth/bandages
in the photo might also represent another layer of hiding or erasing the
indigenous/mestiza face. Thus we might interpret the photograph as
indicative of Ponce’s desire to hide/erase her nose by way of the surgical
146
knives as well as by way of the white cloth/bandages that conceal her
face. In the end, that which is painfully nonaesthetic and must therefore remain hidden from view is not just Ponce’s nose but her entire
racial/ethnic face itself. The fact that not just her nose but three quarters of her face is absent is significant. That her mouth is missing might
also reinforce the stereotype of the “mute” and passive indigenous
woman. Overall, the message that we get is that Ponce’s racial/ethnic
markers must be physically erased (via cosmetic surgery) and/or hidden from view (via the white cloth/bandages). In the end we are presented with the double erasure of Ponce’s racial/ethnic features, left
only with a fragmented, incomplete image of Ponce, her face superimposed with multiple layers of “whiteness.” And, such a superimposition of whiteness—ideologically, culturally, physically—is poignantly
marked by pain.
Yet, pain, as Gillespie and other feminist critics argue, is only one
side of the coin when it comes to cosmetic surgery. The other side, they
note, is the way in which cosmetic surgery can lead to socioeconomic
mobility. Having recently undergone various high-level corruption
scandals along with a turbulent presidential transition from Alberto
Fujimori’s 10-year authoritarian leadership to Alejandro Toledo’s populist government, Peru continues to suffer from excess poverty, hunger,
soaring inflation rates, and high levels of unemployment. Marked by a
long history of Western colonialism and neocolonialism,13 Peru’s present status is that of a dependent capitalist country—that is to say, a
country whose economy is dominated by foreign capital interests.
In 1999, just a year after “The Face Value of Dreams” was published,
official figures estimated that unemployment, in a nation of approximately 24 million people, was at a 50 percent high (Lawrence J. Speer,
“War and Poverty: A President Seeks Re-election Amid Controversy”
3rd par.). As reported in WIN News, women in Peru—especially poor,
indigenous women—have been most affected by the rising economic
disparities and soaring levels of unemployment (“Status of Women in
Peru Under Specific CEDAW Articles” 1st par). Unable to get by and/or
rely on a single family member’s (i.e., a husband’s) salary alone, women
must also search for ways to make money while at the same time caring for children and/or siblings as well as tending to the household
chores.
In her book When Women Rebel: The Rise of Popular Feminism in
Peru, Carol Andreas presents us not with the stereotypical image of
the “average third-world woman” but rather offers a more realistic
147
portrayal of Peruvian women—women whose lives are characterized
by long histories of political activism, agency, resistance, and social
struggle. Demanding basic needs from the government such as jobs,
running water, housing, sanitation, electricity, food, health care, child
care, reproductive rights, and labor protection laws, Andreas discusses how women in Peru have organized labor strikes, massive street
political protests and manifestations, taken over buildings and factories, as well as participated in armed struggles of resistance. While
several organized and collective resistance efforts by Peruvian women
have been successful, many have been met with harsh state reprisals.
In fact, as Andreas highlights, more often than not, women’s demands
for public health care, running water, electricity, and better wages
get read by the powerful ruling Peruvian elite as political acts of
“subversion.” Notwithstanding the retaliation with which resistance
efforts in Latin America are often met, the extensive history and
longevity of women’s resistance movements and organizing efforts in
Peru as well as elsewhere in the Americas highlight the ways in which
these women, contrary to dominant stereotypes of Third World
women (as passive, docile victims) actively assert and exercise their
political agency.
Given that jobs, especially decent paying jobs, are extremely limited
in Peru, it should come to no surprise that a nonindigenous appearance has become one of the requirements in a competitive job market
where good jobs have historically been reserved for light-skinned
males. Thus as job competition increases, so do tensions along racial
and gendered lines. Further, as more and more multinational corporations move into the Third World in search for cheaper (female) labor,
there becomes an even greater need on behalf of these corporations
and local national elites to further strengthen and uphold rigid race
and gender classificatory systems—this, in an effort to secure a reliable
pool of cheap labor for foreign-owned industries (i.e., maquiladoras)
while simultaneously reserving the better paying national jobs for the
light-skinned populations. As Andreas observes, in 1985 “women
who retain[ed] indigenous cultural traits in language and dress [were]
considered totally ineligible for [certain] jobs” (125). Today, these
types of “qualifications” for better-paying jobs have exceeded language and cultural dress in that they now also include a nonindigenous physiognomy, illustrating the ways in which job competition in
the region has further exacerbated forms of institutionalized racism,
adding to national exclusionary practices.
148
When we look at the limited resources and alternatives for poor
women in Peru and the systems of domination that exclude Third
World women from accessing forms of social power, cosmetic surgery,
however much a painful procedure embedded in sexist and racist ideologies, offers women like Ponce the possibility for socioeconomic
mobility. In a country like Peru where the professional job sector is
marked by deep gender, racial, and class divides, cosmetic surgery
becomes both a problem and a solution to indigenous and/or mestiza
women’s searches for better lives. Clearly Ponce’s, Espichan’s, and
Lira’s respective decisions to undergo surgery are deeply influenced by
their desires to enter the competitive job and/or marriage market. And,
while their surgical alterations may ascribe to racist Western beauty
ideals, such acts nonetheless carry the potential promise for social
betterment. As Gillespie writes, although women who opt for cosmetic
surgery do, on various levels, “conform to dominant images of
beauty,” this “conformity may function subversively and enable them
to achieve social power and have their voices heard” (81). In essence,
one type of pain (cosmetic surgery) relieves another kind of pain—the
pain of being unemployed, racially discriminated against, and/or
deemed sexually unattractive by dominant standards, and so on. As
such, it would be a mistake to conclude that Ponce, Lira, and Espichan
are blindly seduced and “lured” by a sexist and racist politics of
appearance inasmuch as it would be erroneous to read these women’s
surgical transformations as celebratory moments of “triumph” devoid
of history and social struggle. Refusing to engage in false “either/or”
dichotomies (i.e., Third World/First World, exploited/liberated,
passive/active, backward/postmodern) permits us to overcome dominant, overarching tendencies that read women like Ponce, on the one
hand, as agency-less and eternally oppressed, and, on the other hand,
as devoid of history and social context.
While this is not to suggest that cosmetic surgery is the answer to all
of the socioeconomic problems that affect women of color—indeed, as
Gillespie observes, while such a “solution” certainly offers women
access to social power at the individual level, at the macro-level, however, such actions can be disempowering in that they fail to challenge
an inherently oppressive system—it is an acknowledgment of the
global/local systems of domination that, by and large, inform Third
World women’s decisions to undergo cosmetic surgery. It seems that a
critical challenge for both First World and Third World feminists alike
would be to work toward subverting dominant, reductive binary
narratives (i.e., exploitation versus liberation) while simultaneously
149
redirecting the gaze to the historical forces that give rise to the
exploitation of Third World women as well as the various ways in
which women actively resist and challenge these forces.
Notes
1. I use the terms Third World women and/or “women of color” throughout my
essay much in the same way that Chandra Talpade Mohanty uses it in her
respective works. See “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and the
Politics of Feminism” and “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses,” Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism,
edited by Mohanty, Ann Russo, Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991), 1–47, 51–80. According to Mohanty, “third world
women” is an analytical and political category that refers to “an imagined community” of “potential alliances and collaborations across divisive boundaries”
(4). Notwithstanding, I use both terms (Third World and Women of color)
provisionally, given the lack of currency that these terms elicit in the context of
Latin America.
2. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy v. 1, edited by Frederick
Engels, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling, 1992 ed. (New York:
International Publishers, 1967). See Part I, “Commodities and Money”
43–144.
3. See Harold E. Pierce, M.D., ed., “Cosmetic Head and Face Surgery: Ethnic
Considerations,” Cosmetic Plastic Surgery in Nonwhite Patients (New York:
Grune and Stratton, 1982), 37–49; see in particular pages 43–44.
4. The following are a few texts that provide important critical analyses of the
historical construction and political functions of race: Hannah Arendt, The
Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948); Samir Amin,
Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989);
David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning
(Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993); Colette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism,
Power and Ideology (New York: Routledge, 1995); David R. Roediger, The
Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class
(London: Verso, 1991).
5. Sander L. Gilman, Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic
Surgery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Elizabeth Haiken, Venus
Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1997).
6. Ibid.
7. Rosemary Gillespie, “Women, the Body and Brand Extension in Medicine:
Cosmetic Surgery and the Paradox of Choice,” Women & Health 24.4 (1996):
69–85; Sandra L. Bartky, Femininity and Domination: Studies in the
Phenomenology of Oppression (London: Routledge, 1990).
8. Adrian Howe, Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality
(New York: Routledge, 1994); see in particular chapter five.
150
9. It should be noted that even new popular television shows that capitalize on
cosmetic surgery, i.e., I Want a Famous Face, tend to deemphasize the pain by
focusing on the desired end results. While the process and procedure of
cosmetic surgery is certainly a sensationalized part of the shows—we see the
knives and the needles digging into the participants’ flesh, and later we also witness the patients’ post-operative pain—the painful aspects are ultimately
assuaged and subsumed by the desired end results: happy, smiling women
(and some men) who immediately forget about the pain following their
makeovers. Moreover, even when a patient’s pain is emphasized on these
shows, many such segments only last a few seconds.
10. Paula Jones filed a federal civil suit against U.S. President William Clinton for
sexual harassment in 1994. Without an apology or admission of guilt, the case
was settled in 1998 when Clinton agreed to pay Jones $850,000.
11. During a “Third World Feminisms” course in which I incorporated a discussion on some of these issues, a student of mine, Berhan Bayleyegn, suggested
that such sensationalized news articles might also serve the purpose of dissuading U.S. consumers from investing in cheaper foreign surgical practices,
thereby reducing growing competition between expensive U.S.-based surgeries
and cheaper Latin American ones.
12. In fact, whereas Third World women seeking surgical alterations tend to be,
for the most part, represented as poor and/or unemployed—their very physical appearance and racial/ethnic features being that which excludes them from
entering the job market—White women seeking surgical alterations tend to
be represented as already “working professionals.” See, e.g., Jill Neimark’s
article, “Changing of Face . . . Change of Fate” in Psychology Today
(May–June 1994), which talks about the ways in which White women’s
desires for surgery are informed by their intent to remain competitive in the
workplace (as opposed to, e.g., Ponce’s desires to enter it).
13. Colonized by Spain in the sixteenth century, Peru gained its independence in
1821. Soon after, British economic interests took over the region followed by
North American economic and political domination in the late nineteenth
century and throughout the twentieth century. During the last 35 years or so,
Peru has undergone a series of economic crises, unstable leadership, deep
political turmoil, and growing social agitation, all of which have led to the rise
of popular and organized armed struggles of resistance (i.e., the Tupac Amaru
and the Shining Path guerrillas).
Bibliography
Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism. trans. Russell Moore. New York: Grune & Stratton,
1982.
Andreas, Carol. When Women Rebel: The Rise of Popular Feminism in Peru.
Westport: Lawrence Hill and Company, 1985.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1948.
Bartky, Sandra L. Femininity and Domination: Studies in the Phenomenology of
Oppression. London: Routledge, 1990.
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Bordo, Susan. “ ‘Material Girl’: The Effacements of Postmodern Culture.”
Michigan Quarterly Review 29(4) (1990), 653–677.
Brush, Pippa. “Metaphors of Inscription: Discipline, Plasticity and the Rhetoric of
Choice.” Feminist Review 58 (1998), 22–43.
Davis, Kathy. “Remaking the She-Devil: A Critical Look at Feminist Approaches
to Beauty.” Hypatia 6(2) (1991), 21–43.
Ellison, Katherine. “Mexico Puts on a Foreign Face: To Look More ‘American’,
They Opt for a Poor Man’s Nose Job.” San Jose Mercury News December 16,
1990: 1A. SAVETM Available: MediaStream, Inc. August 7 1998 ⬍http://
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DOCNUM⫽97611⬎.
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Republic Clinic Has Reputation as Quick and Cheap.” San Jose Mercury News
September 4, 1998.
Gillespie, Rosemary. “Women, the Body and Brand Extension in Medicine:
Cosmetic Surgery and the Paradox of Choice.” Women & Health 24(4) (1996),
69–85.
Gilman, Sander L. Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic
Surgery. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
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Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1993.
Guillaumin, Colette. Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology. New York: Routledge,
1995.
Haiken, Elizabeth. Venus Envy: A History of Cosmetic Surgery. Baltimore, MD:
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997.
Howe, Adrian. Punish and Critique: Towards a Feminist Analysis of Penality. New
York: Routledge, 1994.
Kaw, Eugenia. “ ‘Opening’ Faces: The Politics of Cosmetic Surgery and Asian
American Women.” In Many Mirrors: Body Image and Social Relations. Nicole
Sault, ed. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1994, 241–265.
Koop, David. “The Face Value of Dreams.” San Jose Mercury News February
1998, 14, 21A.
Lutz, Catherine and Jane Collins. “The Photograph as an Intersection of Gazes:
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ed. New York: Routledge, 1994, 363–384.
Marx, Karl. Capital: A Critique of Political Economy v. 1. Frederick Engels, ed.,
trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. 1992 edn. New York: International
Publishers, 1967.
Matory, W. Earle Jr., M.D., F.A.C.S., ed. Ethnic Considerations in Facial Aesthetic
Surgery. New York: Lippincott-Raven, 1998.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Cartographies of Struggle: Third World Women and
the Politics of Feminism” and “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and
Colonial Discourses.” In Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism.
Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1991, 1–47; 51–80.
Morgan, Kathryn Pauly. “Women and the Knife: Cosmetic Surgery and the
Colonization of Women’s Bodies.” Hypatia 6(3) (1991), 25–53.
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1994: 42 (8 pages). MELVYL ® Available: MAGS. August 5, 1998 ⬍http://192.
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9.3/CM&CScs⫽9&Cdisplay(3,1cit.txt,abbrev)⬎.
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New York: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1991.
8
A Fraction of National Belonging:
“Hybrid Hawaiians,” Blood Quantum,
and the Ongoing Search for Purity
_
J. Kehaulani Kauanui
She is just the type of child some folks desperately wish I would bring
into this world. Why? Because she is classified genuine “50 percent
blooded” Hawaiian. This is how some talk about it. Never mind that
the other “half” is Chinese; they could care less about the other racial
makeup. She could be Puerto Rican, Filipino, Portuguese, White, or
Japanese. What counts here, in some minds, is her Hawaiian “blood.”
This reproductive description—indeed, this reproductive prescription—
is not limited to me as a light skinned “less than 50 percent” Hawaiian
per se; a 50 percent blood quantum rule continues to define “native
Hawaiian” in state policy (see figure 8.1).
This racial criterion of 50 percent originates in the Hawaiian Homes
Commission Act of 1920, which allotted lease lands for residential, agricultural, and pastoral purposes. Eligibility for land leasing is restricted
to those “descendants with at least one-half blood quantum of individuals inhabiting the Hawaiian Islands prior to 1778.” The stated
intention of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act was to provide lands
for Hawaiians in need of “rehabilitation.” The legislation targeted
urban Hawaiians in Honolulu—those who were dispossessed, diseased,
and suffering from rapid depopulation. Racial constructions of
Hawaiianness reflect dominant understandings of blood-notions—that
is, the assumption that “loss of blood” means loss of culture, where
blood quantum is calculated on the basis the generational proximity of
one’s genetic relationship, as a direct lineal descendent, to those who are
154
_
supposedly “full blood,” as in unmixed. This specific blood racialization of Hawaiians, through various drafts of the bill prior to the passage
of the legislation emerged as a way to shift the arguments for the bill
that were based on Hawaiian land entitlement over to the privileging of
White American property interests.1 (Kauanui 1999, 2002). Since then,
the state of Hawaii reified this federal definition when it institutionalized the Department of Hawaiian Home Lands and the Office of
Hawaiian Affairs. Hence, Hawaiian anxieties about “measuring up,” in
terms of having enough “blood,” exceed the metaphorical.
As for measurements, that is nearly all the information now
available on this girl-child, besides the fact that the photograph was
taken in 1930. The back of the original has no name; it reads
“Chinese–Hawaiian girl.” Her name alone could tell us more about
her cultural affiliation. It might have been Napuahiwahiwa, Carolyn,
Ling, or Alma. Who are her parents? It is very likely that her mother
was Hawaiian and her father was Chinese (one of the most common
couplings in Hawaiì during that time). And who raised her? On which
island does she stand? Niìhau? Kauaì? Molokai? Lanai? Oàhu?
Maui? Hawaiì? There are no coconut trees here, no sandy beach in
the background. Where is she? She could be on a school playground,
in the yard of an orphanage, or on Hawaiian Home Lands.
These different scenarios help me imagine her racial identity/
trajectory, her familial and community context. To “know her” would
necessarily begin by locating her—to receive her—to engage her, and
yes, possibly even rank her (genealogically) depending on her Hawaiian
lineage. Perhaps this photo is an ultimate example of a form of visual
extrapolation, of individualization. As Jacqueline Urla and Jennifer
Terry argue, “bodies—like all objects that acquire the status of the
Real through elaborate processes that represent them as material—are
condensations and displacement of social relations.” In Hawaiian
terms, I do not know who she is because I do not know her name or
the family she belonged to and who she became.
I came across this photograph (see figure 8.1) at the National
Anthropological Archives in Washington, D.C. while researching the
papers and field notes of William A. Lessa from the 1930s. Lessa
worked in Hawaiì as a field assistant to Harry L. Shapiro of the
American Museum of Natural History who directed an anthropometric study of “Chinese–Hawaiian hybrids.” Lessa was a graduate student of Harvard where he had earned his B.A. degree in 1928. He was
also affiliated with the Columbia Medical Center, studying there for
over a year before being sent to Hawaiì. Once there, compared the
155
Figure 8.1 “Chinese–Hawaiian Girl,” 1930 photograph included in papers of
William A. Lessa, National Anthropological Archives.
156
_
“mixed” Hawaiian–Chinese with the “integrated” Hawaiians and
Chinese by locating, photographing, measuring, and securing blood
samples from them. For reasons that will become increasingly clear,
out of 5,700 participants, there were 4,214 children in all.2
This essay discusses the blood quantum requirement for Hawaiians
and the study of Hawaiian blood mixture. I focus on the persistence of
the 50 percent rule defining “native Hawaiian” and the documentation
of the search for the full-blood Hawaiians in Lessa’s study and how it
resonates with contemporary nationalist impulses among Hawaiians,
as a response to the blood quantum rule and scientific discourses of
hybridity that characterize Hawaiian people. Besides offering my meditations of the photo itself, I discuss the discourses of blood that saturate current political projects geared toward assertions of indigenous
Hawaiian sovereignty and how they specifically implicate Hawaiian
women and their potential offspring. I explore what the photo evokes
for me as someone invested in these same sovereignty struggles and aim
to open up critical conversations about problematics that emerge at the
intersections of the state’s demand that Hawaiians prove their ancestry
and nationalist anxieties about Hawaiian meeting such criteria and
visibility linked to physical presence and phenotypical recognition.
The Production of Racial Knowledge
This study was part of a larger project that the University of Hawaii
initiated to examine the physiological, sociological, and psychological
effects of race-mixing in Hawaii. Besides the involvement of the
American Museum of Natural History, other researchers who participated in this Rockefeller-funded study were based at Harvard’s Peabody
Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology and the Bishop Museum in
Honolulu. The stated impetus of the study was to build on the work of
Franz Boas by studying the life of immigrants’ children’s physicality to
map any substantial shifts in growth. Besides investigating bodily size
and “vigor,” Shapiro and Lessa set out to delineate the “laws of inheritance” in mixed-race subjects to examine “the ‘Mendelian laws’ which
operate in such heredity” drawing from a particular set of traits and
measurements under investigation.3 Even though this study was
primarily focused on genetics, not surprisingly, the project of photographing each subject was demanded. David Green, mapping photography and anthropology as mutual technologies of power, argues that
As the position and status of the “inferior” races became increasingly
fixed, so sociocultural difference came to be regarded as dependent
Hybrid Hawaiians
157
upon hereditary characteristics. Since these were inaccessible to direct
observation they had to be inferred from physical and behavioral traits
which, in turn, they were intended to explain. Sociocultural differences
among human populations became subsumed within the identity of the
human body.4
Green delineates how anthropology was integral to the maintenance
of colonial economic and political power and that photography was
“paramount in the formation of a particular discourse of race which
was located in the conceptualization of the body as the object of
anthropological knowledge.”5 Here “othered” bodies of colonial subjects were subjected to the eye of salvage anthropology’s camera.
Hawaiì was a desirable location for the Shapiro/Lessa study as it
already had the reputation for being a “great laboratory” for racial
research. Besides the oft-uttered notation that Hawaiì was the great
melting pot, researchers reported that Hawaiì was ideal
because for some reason people here can supply accurate record about
their own genealogies. This may be a survival from ancient Hawaiian
days, when a man knew exactly who he was, and no doubt about it,
helped perhaps by the attitude of the Chinese, who also know who their
ancestors were. Besides that, rumor has it that the Kamehameha School
[for children of Hawaiian ancestry] and the Palama Settlement, have
very considerable masses of data.6
Here, genealogical knowledge was crucial to this genetic study even
while the radicalized terms of the study effaced genealogical identification at every turn. Lessa was dismayed that he was
“finding fewer pure Hawaiians than anyone had ever supposed, and for
this he was criticized by some who thought he was being too strict in his
criteria, which included not only visual inspection but also public health
records, data supplied by the potential subjects themselves . . . [and] . . .
hearsay gossip about illegitimacy . . .”.7
Lessa found the sources of “hearsay gossip” to be important relationships in his work “because of their value as informants in supplying
genealogical information.”8 Specifically he was concerned with the
“ ‘purity’ of subjects claiming to be Hawaiians or Chinese [sic]Hawaiians with no Haole (White) or other admixture . . .”9 Lessa
concluded that because of their help, he had to eliminate large numbers
of persons as subjects and that “this was contrary to the prevailing
158
_
opinion regarding the number of pure Hawaiians in the Islands.”10 He
cited the census, for example, which “used a broad ethnic identity and
counted twenty times the number” that he did.11
Lessa’s search proved to be a taxing one as his correspondence with
supervisor Shapiro reveals frustration at the many “suspicious
Hawaiians,” who, he would eventually find out, were not “pure” after
all.12 Genealogical informants would often alert him to the fact that so
and so’s grandfather, for example, was actually English or Tahitian.
Lessa’s quest for the “pure” Hawaiians and his subsequent
disappointment with finding them to be “hybrid” was conveyed
repeatedly in his personal letters to Shapiro who advised him “Don’t
be discouraged about the Haole [White] fly in the Hawaiian ointment.
It will surprise you after a while to realize how many we really are
getting who are Chinese, Hawaiian, or a mixture without extraneous
elements.”13 Long after the study, which was to his disappointment
never published, Lessa reflected: “Undoubtedly, considerable skepticism about my work was felt by persons who used a loose definition
of ‘pure’ Hawaiian. I was motivated by accuracy in a study of unmixed
subjects.”14
Besides standardized anthropometric measurement data and photographs, other materials gathered by Lessa include birth and marriage
certificates, as well as other genealogical data. Lessa’s field notebooks
alone contain provocative information such as the names of the people studied, who were not to be identified in the work intended for
publication, and whose names are not listed on the photographs and
measurement cards. A number of ethical issues emerge. Besides basic
issues of privacy for those who were involved in the study, many of
whom might be living today, identification politics in Hawaiì now is
bound up with rights to land and revenues access and customary gathering practices under state authority—all of which are based on the
ability to meet the blood quantum criterion. Some of this evidence
could very well harm contemporary Hawaiians whose relations
claimed themselves as “full blood” Hawaiians—and from whose
claims blood degree was figured within legal documentation.
One letter in particular underscores the delicate nature of anthropometric studies that reveal the sensitive risks involved in securing an
individual’s hereditary information, especially in regards to forms of
personal consent that were rendered moot for the children involved.
A Hawaiian mother writes to her daughter’s teacher at the school,
where the study extends about her daughter’s background: “She was
found in the graveyard . . . she was taken to the Children[’s] Hospital
Hybrid Hawaiians
159
and I went to adopt her. We don’t know who her real folks are . . . She
goes as Chinese H [awaiian]. Don’t tell her any thing she dose [sic]
not know that she is adopt [ed] by me. As I always tell her that I am
her ma.”15
The above case also reveals how particular forms of knowledge can
escape the camera’s lens. While bodies “do indeed enjoy the status of
the Real and the material, and thus become a powerful source of medical and scientific knowledge as much as they become grounds form
articulating political claims . . . they become surface onto which
physicians, scientists, and lay people can inscribe and project powerful
cultural meanings and moral prohibitions.”16 Similarly, the technology of photography in anthropological discourse became a form of
anthropological knowledge.
Mapping Hybridity
Her picture is like a snapshot, unlike the established procedures for
scientists producing physical type photographs. Certainly, Lessa
would have been familiar that the formula that was intended to provide standardization for scientific study. Given their own criteria,
what would have been the purpose to take and keep this image?
Perhaps Lessa was keen to show her individual traits rather than put
her in a lineup of “racial types.” To show her outside, with the sunlight and shade across her face, seems to catch her in the midst of her
daily routine; it seems to document her mixed existence as normative.
Thus, this photograph becomes a different form of anthropological
knowledge about racial hybridity.
The Shapiro–Lessa study was not the first of its kind: earlier studies
of this type had attempted to map Hawaiian hybridity through the charting of physical corporeality through measurements, photographs, and
reports that represented the different (pheno)types of Hawaiians. Before
the Shapiro–Lessa study, Leslie C. Dunn also undertook genetic research
on Hawaiians. His work was undertaken at the Peabody Museum of
American Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, based on
data collected by Alfred M. Tozzer who was collaborating with Hooten
in 1916 (both of whom later participated in Shapiro’s study). In 1928,
Dunn published the results in An Anthropomorphic Study of Hawaiians
of Pure and Mixed-Blood.17 There he noted that at that time there was
no other data on living “pure” Hawaiians.18
I am particularly interested in this study because of its timing in
Hawaiian history. How was Dunn’s work part of a larger body of
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constitutive discourses that were later deployed by U.S. government
officials in decisions regarding the larger body politic? We should
consider the process by which the statistical “disappearance” of the
“pure” Hawaiian was constantly re-evoked in political contexts—such
as United States Congressional Debates—where definitions of
Hawaiianness, based on blood notions, were codified. Although
Dunn’s analysis of Tozzer’s data was not published until 1928,
Tozzer’s actual work in the field (1916–1920) was just prior to the
passing of the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act. Dunn’s work details
anthropometric descriptions of “Native Hawaiians” (unmixed) and
some descendants “from crosses of Hawaiians with other races’—
namely offspring from Hawaiian women with European or Chinese
men. Dunn concluded that “The evidence of Chinese blood in the
hybrids are throughout more easily and certainly distinguishable than
the Hawaiian traits.”19 Dunn found that hybrid mixes might bring
about positive results, noting “The impression gained by the observer
was that the hybrids arising from the cross of Hawaiians and the
Chinese were normal persons, frequently combining the more valuable
personal characteristics of both parent types . . . persons of this
descent are apparently not handicapped, either physically or mentally,
in comparison with either parent type.”20 The notion that some mixes
produced more viable subjects than others is a common feature in
many of these studies that lean toward a form of “positive” eugenics,
theorizing which matings could produce the ideal citizen within such a
varied island population forcibly incorporated in the American body
politic.
These reports treat the Hawaiian body as an historical artifact,
a material object of the past. The science of the hybrid Hawaiian is
about the authority and pronouncement that worked to reconstitute
different racialized fragments into a “neo-Hawaiian” body, with a
new label, containing it within an already operative system of classifications and racial schema. While it may be true “[t]o a greater or lesser
extent that reorientation of anthropological theory in the 1920s
involved the rejection of racial classification as the structuring principal of anthropological inquiry,”21 I argue that “hybridity” itself
became the 1930s racial classification for Hawaiians. David Green
argues that “the practices of anthropometry, and the photographic
genre which it had fostered, were virtually abandoned by anthropologists whose interests were [re]directed” toward ethnography.22 But
a cursory glance at the studies of the “hybrid Hawaiians” would
support the argument that perhaps racially mixed subjects provided
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a site where this type of work flourished. Green further argues that
“the body has become the focus of a social rather than a biological
identity and its significance is no longer of a psychological but cultural
order.”23
The hybrid Hawaiian, as studies reveal, provided a subject where
concerns of the biological and social were intricately bound. These discourses on Hawaiians produced particular objects of knowledge.
Although these racial productions vary, they are stunning exercises
evincing that “[f]acination with mixing and unity is a symptom of preoccupation with purity and decomposition.”24 In the taxonomic, one
cannot see what is excluded. But in the taxonomy of the hybrid
Hawaiian, nothing at all is excluded. Hence, the term “Hawaiian”
almost became meaningless, as island version of “American” without
its unmarked dominant whiteness. Hence, now it is not enough to say
“Hawaiians” to talk about Hawaiians. Instead, Hawaiians and nonHawaiians alike employ markers to specify—real, indigenous,
Native—to refill that which has been emptied of meaning as a signifier.
An early example of this all-inclusive subjectivity is provided in a
1932 report by William Atherton Du Puy. At the time, Du Puy was the
executive assistant to the United States Secretary of the Interior. He
compiled his research into a work titled Hawaii and Its Race
Problems.25 Drawing on work by yet another researcher—Romanzo
Adams, who wrote Interracial Marriage in Hawaii: A Study of the
Mutually Conditioned Process of Acculturation and Amalgamation in
193726—Du Puy predicted that
[T]here ultimately must be a fusion, and that in the end the HawaiianAmerican will be a composition of all the people who have settled here
as permanent residents . . . On the basis of the present populations
he . . . [sic] . . . will be something near one-third Japanese, one-fifth
Filipino, one-ninth Portuguese, one-tenth Hawaiian, one-twelfth Chinese,
one-fifteenth Anglo-Saxon, with a sprinkling of Korean, Puerto Rican,
and what-not.27
Interestingly Du Puy’s term “Hawaiian–American” never took hold in
Hawaiì and that in general, hyphenated identities do not hold much
currency in contemporary Hawaiì contexts. Also, the term “Hawaiian”
is commonly reserved for someone indigenous to Hawaii who traces
their ancestry to the people who occupied the Islands prior to Cook’s
landing in 1778. While—according to the 1990 U.S. census—over
96 percent of indigenous Hawaiians are mixed-race, Hawaiians still
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make distinctions between someone with this traceable ancestry and
someone else who merely resides in Hawaiì.28 It is important to note
that in the 2000 census, 282,667 people in Hawaiì identified themselves as at least part Hawaiian or Pacific Islander—an increase of
74.2 percent from 1990, while 113,539 described themselves solely as
a member of that group.29 This suggests the endurance of Hawaiian
indigenous identities, regardless of blood quantum and dominant
insistence that those who do not meet the 50 percent blood rule
become honorary Whites (or Asians, for that matter).
These studies were an important part of the “remaking” of
Hawaiians, not simply attempts to understand and map the genetic
makeup and changing construct of Hawaiians. Indeed, they came sites
where Hawaii’s multiracial visibility marked a new episteme in a rapidly changing Hawaiian geographical–colonial–political landscape. In
this context, Hawaiianness was made sense of through a constitution
of racialized notions what makes a Hawaiian. These reformulated
notions—their indigenous content effaced—were then reinserted into
multiracial Hawaii’s wider material-semiotic process and inscribed
onto a new pluralist body politic, which always already, then, figures
Hawaiì as a site of hyper-mixedness.
Women and Children of the Nation
To me she seems hesitant, like she is holding something else besides her
right hand. Perhaps censuring a full smile? Or maybe just barely forcing
the one she offered along with her upright posture. Her haircut is short,
perhaps cut just in time for the photo? She could have been at hula practice and then changed into her Sunday best. Or maybe she was
approached just after getting out of church. She looks ready to bolt—
back to class, back to Uncle’s Kitchen in the tenement project in
Chinatown, to the beach, to hold hands with her girlfriend and tell grand
stories, to the book she was reading, to the cane fields. Or maybe she was
learning how to weave lauhala from Aunty. Maybe she was pulled away
from her Chinese language class where she was trying to keep up with
her brother who was on his way to China (being sent by their father so
he would have a customary upbringing and not associate with the
Hawaiian boys then marked for doom). Perhaps she was writing a letter
in cursive to her oldest sister who was sent away to live with their grandparents, Hawaiian-style, as is common for the first-born grandchild.
Which Hawaiian counts and for whom? During a long-distance
phone call from Hawaiì, an activist friend asked me, in desperation,
Hybrid Hawaiians
163
“What are we gonna do when the full-bloods die out? How will we
define our lahui [nation of people]?” I feel a strong sense of despair
when I think of his alarm. Yet I am also critical of his assumptions and
their implications. What he was suggesting is that piha kanaka maoli
(“full” Hawaiians) currently defines who Hawaiian people are as
lahui, and that our future rests with them—an impossible burden
indeed. The symbolic demand for the “full-blood” or piha Hawaiian
creates desire over and above the imaginary need. Within Hawaiian
struggles, proving indigeneity is critical to recognition of the indigenous collective subjectivty. The state and population at large demand
that Hawaiianness be quantifiable. To quantitively measure
Hawaiianness is to try to endow the category with quality.
The blood quantum rule leads Hawaiian people to be classed into
two categories, the “50 percenters,” and the “less than fifties.” Piha
Hawaiians are rarely explicitly named unless in relation to their predicted demise. My friend’s anxiety—and that of many Hawaiians—is
a haunting refrain. In Hawaiian nationalist contexts, one often hears
the political leaders cite numerical figures of Hawaiian mixedness as
an index of Hawaiian extinction. Prominent sovereignty activist,
Kekuni Blaisdell, M.D. frequently warns that “today there are less
than 8,000 piha kanaka maoli (pure Hawaiians) remaining.”30
Blaisdell also reports that the United States census evaluation predicts
that by the year 2020 there will be no more piha kanaka maoli.31
Linked to these recitations, many Hawaiians urge Hawaiian people to
hoòulu lahui—to reinvigorate the nation of Hawaiian people—to
create and bear more Hawaiians, preferably the “more than fifties.”
My friend who phoned was clearly taking refuge in the imaginary need
for the authentic sign, with the body as ultimate referent to cope with
the political anxieties that come with confirmation, becoming a legal
subject and exiting wardship status—two key goals propelling the
ongoing Hawaiian struggle for sovereign self-governance.
These issues all resonate strongly with a 1930 article that suggests,
as its title states, that the “Perpetuation of Hawaiian Race Rests with
Children.”32 While true that the future of any people rests with the
welfare of its children, the perpetuation of Hawaiians rests with out
collective ability to raise our children well and with the means to do
so. This consideration is easily lost in the push for the production of
Hawaiian children. Why should Hawaiian children bear the burden of
bearing Hawaiian children? What is striking in the case of this article
is that just as the piha maoli are objectified, so are Hawaii’s children;
a combination that may in itself reveal and infantilization of piha
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maoli. In both cases, there is the concern with developing a degree of
competence in order for the survival of the rest of us. This article was
printed in the Honolulu Advertiser during the same year that Lessa set
out to measure and document Hawaiian children of non-mixed and
mixed-Chinese ancestry. More specifically, the article speaks to the
decade marked a decade since the passing of the Hawaiian Homes
Commission Act of 1920. In the United States federal hearings prior to
the Act, notions about who constituted “native Hawaiians” were
drawn from both scientific and common knowledge about whether
“part-Hawaiians” were endowed with enough difference to warrant
their access to land leasing. In the earliest draft bill preceding the Act,
Congress first mooted the blood quantum criterion by evoking the living conditions of mixed-race Chinese–Hawaiians who were described
as not being “in need” of “special legislation.” These “part-Hawaiians,”
in particular, were configured as a political threat to White plantation
interests. Hence, Hawaiianness was constituted in the name of “rehabilitating the Native” while limiting the empowerment of Hawaiians
who were also of Asian ancestry.
The continued legal “demand” for Hawaiians who can document
their blood quantum at 50 percent or more has in turn fueled an
anxiety among many Hawaiians, as evinced in nationalist calls to
“replenish the race” by reproduction. These calls have significant
bearing on Hawaiian women as well as the transformation of
genealogical reckoning. Perhaps more importantly, it is Hawaiian
women that are calling on other Hawaiian women. At a feminist family values forum, sovereignty leader Mililani Trask also made note of
this push, stating that “There is a saying in the Hawaiìan [sic] culture
that you can marry whomever you wish, but mate with your own
kind. In this way, we regenerate our numbers.”33 The heterosexual
configuration of such a dictate is unmarked, but the concern Trask
articulates is one of mass depopulation. She explains that “When
Cook arrived there were one million Kanaka Maoli [Hawaiians]; a
generation and a half later, at the time of the US overthrow, 39,000 of
us remain. Today we are 200,000 Kanaka Maoli. You see that our
population is increasing, because we love each other.”34 Trask is not
alone marking the impetus on reviving a people. In the collection
Autobiography of Protest in Hawai’i, Hawaiian sovereignty activist
Lynette Cruz offers a point that speaks volumes to the issues of pedagogy and reproductive behavior. Cruz also evokes a set of alarming
statistics, noting that “It has been projected that by the year 2044,
there will be no more Hawaiians with 50 percent or more Hawaiian
Hybrid Hawaiians
165
blood. This means, in effect, there will be no more Hawaiians by our
definition, and the federal government no longer has to deal with us as
a people.”35 It is not clear why Cruz says “our definition,” given that
Hawaiian genealogical practices are far more inclusive in defining who
counts as Hawaiian. Hawaiians tend to define Hawaiianness through
ancestral lines of descent, familial relationality that marks kinship to
the land. For one thing, Hawaiianness has historically been reckoned
bilineally—through maternal and/or paternal lines—as well as allowing for non-Hawaiian peoples to be adopted into Hawaiian familial
structures. These persistent genealogical practices are the key form of
contestory modalities through which Hawaiians alternately identify
themselves in relation to the land and other Hawaiians—something
that cannot be done by merely invoking one’s fractional “degree” of
Hawaiian “blood.” As for lessons for other Hawaiians, Cruz maintains that “When we talk about educating people we’re talking about
educating them right now. Time is short. We’re telling people, especially Hawaiian women, that we need to have some Hawaiian babies
from Hawaiian men who are full-blooded. We need to have these
things documented. This is one strategy that we can use to make sure
that Hawaiians do not become extinct by somebody else’s definition.”36
Clearly Cruz’s plea has a sense of urgency. But who is the “we” that
needs the babies and why? Where is the collective and material support
that should come with such a demand? What about Hawaiian men?
Supposing that Hawaiian women were interested in (ful)filling such a
tall order, what would be the method of doing so? How could such a
method avoid objectification? Fetishization? Why not instead infuse
Hawaiian political projects with a similar sense of urgency toward the
goal of wrestling definitions of Hawaiianness away from state-imposed
neocolonial definitions as a profound course of self-determination?
Cynthia Enloe has acknowledged that “Women in many communities
trying to assert their sense of national identity find that coming into an
emergent nationalist movement through the accepted feminine roles of
bearer of the community’s memory and children is empowering.”37
Indeed reproduction as part of Hawaiian women’s self-determined
autonomy is potentially empowering as a form of resisting the overdetermined narratives of Hawaiian dilution, the legacy of Hawaiian
depopulation that has attributed to Hawaiians’ status as a minority in
Hawaiì, and the assault on Hawaiian families via state policies and discourses that, in turn, shape concerns about blood quanta criteria and
notions of indigeneity making it no surprise that Hawaiians are feeling
anxiety about bearing children with more “Hawaiian blood.” The issue
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of population recovery is the impetus for the call to reproduction, not a
call for women to bear sons for the nation, which has characterized
many other nationalist struggles. These calls to hoòulu lahui certainly
have the potential for uneven gendered impact. Hawaiian women’s
reproductive rights are reserved without the alternate construction of
Hawaiian women’s bodily agency, as a site of inevitable betrayal.38
Conclusion
I return to the photograph of this mixed-girlchild. She could be on
a Hawaiian homestead on the island of Molokai with eight brothers
and sisters—their family being boasted and cited as corporeal evidence
that the Hawaiian Homes Commission Act did aid in Hawaiian
“rehabilitation.” I look at her and think of her 1930 girlhood being
inscribed with and imposed upon by other people’s moral and behavioral imperatives—to marry Hawaiian and “make” more Hawaiians
to counter the persistent threat of population demise. Or, maybe
she was to “go Chinese” and marry a Chinese man and bear a son
that would then carry on his father’s line, which might very well entail
an erasure of her own mother, who, as the “Hawaiian greatgrandmother” would likely be unknown to her “Chinese” descendants. Did she marry? If so, he was probably Hawaiian, Chinese,
Hawaiian– Chinese, or Hawaiian-haole (White). Who knows—maybe
she fell in love with a woman and decided to go to another island, or
even San Francisco, Portland, or Vancouver. The hopeful (or disturbing?) part is that she could very well be alive today. If she had children,
maybe they would recognize her upon viewing this picture.
Although the blood quantum criterion is state-imposed, some
Hawaiians are clearly invested in it as some stand to benefit from that
racial form of order. While the criterion seems firmly entrenched,
Hawaiians still employ and deploy Hawaiian genealogical links
whether or not they meet the criterion. Hawaiian genealogical practices
serve as an alternate mode of identification—one that draws from the
source of Hawaiian kinship to the land—is the foundational basis of
all sovereign claims.
What is to gain in the quest for the “pure” Hawaiian? While some
may want to move steadfast on this quest, like Lessa they will certainly
become disappointed, not to mention tired of always finding the
“suspicious” Hawaiians who—even though perhaps a fraction shy of
national belonging—constitute most Hawaiians today. She may not be
the type of girlchild I will have.
Hybrid Hawaiians
167
Notes
1. See Kauanui, J. Kehaulani, “The Politics of Blood and Sovereignty in Rice v.
Cayetano.” Political and Legal Anthropology Review 25(1) 2002: 100–128.
and Kauanui 1999. “For Get” Hawaiian Entitlement: Configurations of
Land, “Blood,” and Americanization in the Hawaiian Homes Commission
Act of 1920. Social Text 59:123–144.
2. Deviant Bodies, edited by Jennifer Terry and Jacqueline Urla (Bloomington
and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press), 6.
3. “Scientist to Examine Cops for ‘Points,’ ” Honolulu Advertiser, July 17,
1930, n.p., n.a.
4. David Green, “Classified Subjects: Photography and Anthropology: The
Technology of Power.” Ten 8(14) 1984: 30–37.
5. Ibid., 31.
6. University of Hawaii Quarterly Bulletin, vol. IX, No. 3, May 1932.
7. William A. Lessa papers, National Anthropological Archives, notation provided by Lessa, under “FRIENDS FROM THE HAWAIIAN COMMUNITY
1930–1932” (n.d.).
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Letter to Andrew Lind, William A. Lessa papers, National Anthropological
Archives.
11. Ibid.
12. Letter to Harry L. Shapiro, William A. Lessa papers, National
Anthropological Archives.
13. Letter to, William A. Lessa, William A. Lessa papers, National
Anthropological Archives.
14. Letter to Andrew Lind, William A. Lessa papers, National Anthropological
Archives.
15. William A. Lessa papers, National Anthropological Archives.
16. Terry and Urla, ibid.
17. Dunn, Leslie C., An Anthropomorphic Study of Hawaiians of Pure or MixedBlood, Papers of the Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and
Ethnology (Harvard University, Cambridge: Peabody Museum, 1928).
18. Ibid., 100.
19. Ibid., 147.
20. Ibid., 147.
21. Green, ibid., 34–35.
22. Ibid., 35.
23. Ibid., 37.
24. Donna Haraway, Modest Witness (New York and London: Routledge, 1997),
214.
25. William Atherton Du Puy, Hawaii and Its Race Problems (Washington:
United States Government Printing Office, 1932).
26. Romanzo, Adams, Interracial Marriage in Hawaii: A Study of the Mutually
Conditioned Process of Acculturation and Amalgamation (New York: AMS
Press, 1937).
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27. William Atherton Du Puy, 115–117.
28. Blaisdell, Kekuni and Noreen Mokuau, “Kanaka Maoli, indigenous
Hawaiians,” in Hawaiì Return to Nationhood, edited by Jonathan Friedman
and Ulla Hasager, 49–67, IWGIA Document 75 (Copenhagen: The
International Working Group of Indigenous Affairs, 1993), 5.
29. Bricking, Tanya and Robbie Dingeman. 2001. Census lists more “Native
Hawaiians” than ever. Honolulu Advertiser, March 20:3.
30. Ibid., 50.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. “Mililani Trask,” Feminist Family Values Forum: Gloria Steinam, Angela
Davis, Maria Jimenez, Mililani Trask, presented by the Foundation for a
Compassionate Society, edited by Susan Bright (Austin, TX: Plain View Press,
1996), 13.
34. Ibid.
35. “Lynette Cruz,” Autobiography of Protest in Hawai’i, edited by Robert H.
Mast and Anne B. Mast, Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press), 381.
36. Ibid., 381–382.
37. Cythia Enloe, Bananas. Beaches & Bases: Making Feminist Sense of
International Politics (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California
Press, 1989), 55.
38. See 1998. Kauanui, Off-Island Hawaiians “Making” Ourselves at “Home”:
A (Gendered) Contradiction in Terms? Women’s Studies International Forum
21(6): 681–693.
Part III
Resistance Images
9
Bearing Bandoleras:Transfigurative
Liberation and the Iconography
of la Nueva Chicana
Maylei Blackwell
Deploying a popular Chicano movement photo as a point of departure,
this essay charts how dominant visual tropes within Chicano movement print culture helped to produce and maintain gendered political
scripts about the terms of women political participation. In turn,
Chicana activists engaged with political icons and politicized iconography in order to negotiate their own political agency and (re)figure
themselves within movement iconography by creating new images of
women’s revolutionary participation. More than just forms of visual
representation, political iconography can be seen as a site of articulation, negotiation, and struggle. This essay explores how the figure of
la Soldadera was transformed during the Chicano movement and how
cultural icons and movement iconography served as a terrain of struggle over the signification or meaning of women’s political agency in the
Chicano movement. This photograph (figure 9.1), which first appeared
in the Chicano Student Movement newspaper in 1968 and was republished in numerous places, including the first issue of La Raza magazine
(where it was advertised as a political poster), represents larger discursive
and ideological struggles around the role women played in the Chicano
movement. It marks one point where “the transfigurative liberation of
the icon”1 began to take place as Chicana feminists reclaimed narratives of women’s participation in the Mexican Revolution of 1910 as
a way to negotiate a different political agency within the masculinist
registers of Chicano nationalism.
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Maylei Blackwell
Figure 9.1 “La Soldadera,” Chicana Student Movement newspaper, 1968. Photograph
by Raul Ruiz.
This essay explores the ways in which gender was constructed
through nationalist discourse and how Chicana feminist interventions
recasted and (re)imagined history in an effort to break open the
confines of the Chicano Nationalism and the symbolic economy of
nation, or Aztlán (the mythic homeland of Chicanos). Visually
mapping the figure of the Soldadera is one way to understand the
cultural work that these reclaimed historical narratives performed in
creating new spaces for women within male dominated movement
discourses and practices.2 It situates this photo and the production of
Chicana feminist iconography within a larger visual cultural history
that unfolded from the circulation of visual images in movement print
culture, slide shows, and the first filmic images produced by Chicanas.
I trace the dominant mode of address and representational strategy of
the Chicano movement through the idealization of the people and the
construction of “heroes” of the people. Movement archetypes, such as
the pachuco, the stoic worker, or romanticized revolutionary, constituted
a field of subject positions that were negotiated over within the social
spaces of the movement. The historic development of an iconography
of the Nueva Chicana can be seen in the ways in which women’s agency
Bearing Bandoleras
173
and political subjectivities were not only constituted by movement imaging practices, but by the ways Chicana feminists refigured themselves
through the circulation and production of their own images. The
iconography of the Nueva Chicana reworked the gendered nationalist
constructions of the Adelita, la Revolucionaria and other figures (such
as the martyr and the revolutionary (m)Other). Deploying different
frames of reference and modes of address in its visual strategies, these
representational practices show us how Chicana activists shifted
nationalist representational registers and figured themselves as new
historical subjects.
In the photo, the image of a young woman, member of the Brown
Berets, captures the contradictions and contestations around the figure
of the Soldadera and the position of women both within narratives
and movement practices of Chicano nationalism. She is politically and
visually present in the movement, but her gaze is turned away;
deflected. The photograph frames her at a medium shot; the top of her
head reaches out of the frame. Because her head is turned, gaze laterally oblique, the viewer’s focus is pulled to the center of her body—her
corazon, pecho—bearing bandoleras. The crossed bandoleras represents an intersection—simultaneously symbolizing her revolutionary
commitment while invoking the complex ways women and women’s
bodies are made to stand in for the nation within both historic projects
of nation building as well as numerous revolutionary struggles.3
The photograph was taken in the late 1960s at the Fiesta de los
Barrios at Lincoln High School invoking the historic East Los Angeles
blow outs where students walked out of their high schools demanding
an end to racist education. It is a grainy black and white image common
to the kind of photojournalism that circulated in movement print
culture. Its impact as a document of the Chicano struggle relies on the
form of realism created by photojournalistic techniques. It is a powerful
movement photo document because, while the context of the rally is
evident, the focus of the image is on one actor, captured by zoom lens.
The quality of realism or its realistic aura key to many political photographs is also reliant on the seemingly unstaged nature of the image. In
documentary fashion, it claims to represent and document a moment in
political history represented as innocent of staging. The woman seems
unaware that her photo is being taken. Yet, she bears the bandoleras
(signifier of both present and historic revolutions) across her heart and
in that way is represented both as a documentary image of an activist
at a political event and a symbol of it. The image of the woman in combat gear is complicated because it signifies her participation in a revolution of national liberation while simultaneously representing the
174
Maylei Blackwell
conflation of her body as a symbol of that nation. This dual signifier has
been used in other anti-imperialist movements for national liberation
before and after the height of the Chicano Movement. Recent scholars
have commented on these contradictions by stating:
Often made to metaphorize the nation, the image of the revolutionary
woman carrying a bomb or waving a flag was celebrated precisely
because her precarious position within the revolution called attention to
its fissures. Thus, the same Third Worldist discourse that valorized the
revolutionary female figure has also condemned Third World feminists
as “traitors to the nation” in response to their critique of the masculinist
narration of the nation.4
The figure of the Soldadera and her manifestation in the image of this
young brown beret activist also calls attention to the fissures of the
nation Aztlán and the manner in which it engenders its subjectcitizens. Many movements in the United States articulated their discursive project of decolonization and anti-imperialism through an ideological alignment with Third World Liberation Movements where
masculinist nationalism was manifest through a construction of a specific revolutionary masculinity, ala Che Guevara. As argued by male
gender critics, then and now, this form of masculinity was seen as an act
of decolonization and reclamation of the dignity men of color had lost
in this particularly patriarchal view of power.5
While this photo first appeared in the early political publication,
Chicano Student Movement newspaper, more recently, this image has
continued to circulate 35 years after its first appearance as a compelling
tribute to Chicana Power on T-shirts and stickers, in a book dedicated
to the basic historical writings of Chicana Feminism and even on the
cover to a Chicano Oldies album.6 As much as this image represents a
site of contestation and negotiation of women’s political subjectivity
and agency within the Chicano movement, it also represents a continued struggle over popular memory and identity formation. As a mediation on the representations of women’s widespread participation in the
Chicano movement, the continued circulation of this image also invokes
the empowering message of Chicana resistance as well as a mode in
which gender is emplotted in the structures of remembrance within the
movement. It also calls our attention to the ways in which women and
Chicana feminism are the eccentric subjects of Chicano movement narratives because they recycle the narrative of male dominance, instead of
representing the complicated ways in which women participated, transformed, and provided leadership in the movement.
Bearing Bandoleras
175
I began to track the cultural work of producing and circulating an
iconography of la Nueva Chicana while conducting an oral history
project with members of las Hijas de Cuauhtémoc. I first noticed the
transfiguration of la Soldadera as an icon while closely studying
the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc newspaper in order to historicize the political
work of Chicana activists of this era.7 What I found was that more than
their conventional political work, the work of engendering the political
culture of the movement helped women to articulate a different political
agency within the imaginary of Chicano nationalism and different political roles for women within the larger political arena of Chicano Civil
Rights in the 1960s and 1970s.8 The iconography of Chicano
Nationalism has been discussed by historian Vicki Ruiz who points out
the limitations it set for women’s agency. She notes the way that the figure of the Soldadera, although a politicized image, often functioned as a
conservative model of the role Chicanas were expected to play in movement. While la Soldadera was seen as loyal camp follower or as a
woman who “stands by her man” to provide comfort to the revolutionary hero, it also circulated with the figure of la Adelita that conjured up
an image of the revolutionary sweetheart. Chicana women leaders and
feministas also reclaimed counter-narratives of revolutionary women
and reclaimed the images of the Soldadera to help contest the conservative cultural images of women circulating in the Chicano movement and
resignify them through the lens of Chicana resistance.9 The Soldadera
signified either foot soldiers of the movement or revolutionary
sweethearts who served the men who were seen as the real actors in
the struggle. In their first issue of the newspaper, the Hijas de
Cuauhtémoc began to resignify the image of the Soldadera through
historical narratives to produce a revolutionary historical agency. This
was part of a larger discursive struggle to craft new genealogies of
revolutionary women who worked for women’s liberation within the
framework of the national revolution. The 1960s Hijas de Cuauhtémoc
took their name from a women’s underground newspaper which called
for the end to the Porfirio Díaz dictatorship and for women’s civil and
political rights in the years before the Mexican Revolution.
As much as Chicano Nationalism was a project of racial justice and
cultural pride, it was a gendered project. The roles of women that were
often viewed as romantic reclamations of traditional mexicano culture10
were in themselves gendered constructs that established a mode of representation of women in movement culture and a code of conduct of what
it meant to be “down” (or a true revolutionary woman). Chicana activists
in the student movement contested the way in which their participation
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was often reduced to their reproductive labor, and how they were seen as
the symbolic bearers of the nation, sites of cultural authenticity, or only
as revolutionary sweet hearts. The fissures this image calls into question
are located at the crossroads of the bandoleras women bear symbolically
and politically.
Visuality and Social Movements: Print Cultures,
Imaged Communities
Benedict Anderson’s influential work articulates a conceptualization
of the Nation as imagined community and explores how Nation is
constituted through print communities.11 Anderson’s study has produced
new insights about social movements, communities of resistance and
anticolonial struggles like the Chicano movement.12 For example,
Partha Chatterjee, a historian involved in the Subaltern Studies Group,
reconfigures Anderson’s formulation for the historical specificity of
anticolonial nationalisms by arguing that it is not through engagement
in conflict with the state but within the cultural realm that prefigures
this struggle where decolonizing nationalist imaginaries are constituted. He argues that anticolonial nationalism creates a domain of
sovereignty within colonial society and that this domain is produced
through “an entire institutional network of printing presses, publishing
houses, newspapers, (and) magazines . . . created . . . outside the
purview of the state . . . through which the new language (nationalist
liberation) . . . is given shape.”13 The Chicano movement deployed a
form of decolonizing nationalism and the circulation of print media in
the form of student and community newspapers, political pamphlets,
and movement magazines, which played a formative role in articulating new political subjectivites as well as a shared, collective (if not
uncontested) notion of Aztlán as the Chicano nation.
Since, the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc deployed strategic feminist reconfigurations of nationalist discourse in the newspaper they published,
they played a vital role in the critique of the national subject as male
and struggled to refigure the Nation (Aztlán) as a space for difference
along axes of gender, sexuality, and class. By reworking notions of
tradition, culture, and history that circumscribed racial, sexual, and
gendered exceptions of women, the work of the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc
multiplied the critical dialogues within their own communities and
between constituencies constituted through an imagined alternative
print community. The members of the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc engaged
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in what Kobena Mercer describes as critical dialogism. He writes that,
“critical dialogism has the potential to overturn the binaristic relations
of hegemonic boundary maintenance by multiplying critical dialogues
within particular communities and between the various constituencies
that make up the ‘imagined community’ of the nation.”14
I have refashioned Anderson’s notion of imagined communities to
include “image(d) communities” by examining the way that the circulation of print media within the Chicano movement was crucial to the
formation of political community. Photos, images, art, photo journalism and collage produced the larger imagined community that linked
activists together through the circulation of print media within the
Chicano movement. The visual culture within these media often
imaged a mode of self-representation and echoed struggles that were
occurring within organizations and movement culture. The reason the
notion of “image(d) communities” is useful is because the production of
visual images and the project of imaging new political agencies for
Chicana through the circulation of these new symbols articulates a
political practice and collective conversation of reimagining historical
subjectivity across temporal and spatial borders. The distribution,
production, and circulation of these print texts in the forms of political
pamphlets and newspapers were critical to the formation of a Chicano
historical consciousness and the images that traveled embedded within
this vibrant print culture was also key to creating image(d) communities which enlisted new political subjects into Chicana subjectivity.
Furthermore, the circulation of image was a powerful constitutive
practice in forming Chicana counterpublics whereby members of this
alternative discursive space produced and were interpellated by an
alternative subjective registers of Chicana feminisms.15
I examine the production of this Chicana feminist iconography by
tracing a larger visual culture that unfolds from the work the Hijas de
Cuauhtémoc—from the circulation of visual images in print cultures,
to forging new image(d) communities through wider networks of conversation, collaboration, and distribution, to the production of a
“Chicana Feminist Slide Show” that Anna NietoGomez developed as
part of her Chicana Studies curriculum, to finally, the transformation
of photographic images compiled by Anna NietoGomez into moving
images for Sylvia Morales’s 1976 film, La Chicana. Emphasizing
the image(d) community of Chicana feminists that were constituted
through the circulation of images in print media, I explore the historical
specificity of Chicano Nationalism and the kind of historical narratives and narrative images it employed.
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Negotiating Icons: Mapping Chicana
Historical Imaginaries in/through
Nationalist Terrains
A nation is not only a political entity but something which produces meanings—a
system of cultural representation. People are not only legal citizens of a nation; they
participate in the idea of the nation as represented in its national culture.16
—Stuart Hall
Chicano cultural nationalism was forged through the recuperation or
rediscovery of a historical legacy suppressed by colonization. More
than the act of reclamation, it was the production of a Chicano identity. If we understand how the formation of a Chicano identity was
crafted through narratives of working-class labor history, migration,
and resistance to colonization, then it is vital for us to also understand
that identities are not fixed in the past and merely recovered through
historical memory. Rather, political identities are constructed through
the narratives of the past and produced through the positioning of the
subject in relationship to those narratives. Stuart Hall’s critical intervention reminds us:
Far from being grounded in a mere “recovery” of the past, which is
waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of
ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different
ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives
of the past.17
An examination of the historical narratives the Chicano movement
marshaled to produce new political identities and create new narratives
of resistance helps us to understand how Chicana subjectivities
were constructed through and positioned by narratives of the past and
how specifically, the figure of the Soldadera was a significant site
through which the meaning of women’s political participation was
articulated, contested, and negotiated. While recuperating histories
suppressed by colonial institutions and epistemologies has been a critical impulse in decolonizing movements, what mapping historical
imaginaries that facilitate the emergence of new Chicana political
subjectivities requires us to consider is that narratives of the past are
also gendered and imbued with silences and power differentials.
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An understanding of how gendered and sexual power function within
these narratives is what Chicana feminist historian Emma Pérez calls
“sexing the decolonial imaginary.”18
If we study how the figure of the Soldadera was recuperated by the
Hijas de Cuauhtémoc to forge a space for dialogue around women’s
issues within the Chicano movement, then we can see how they helped
to change the gendered political modes of movement organizing and
resignify the narratives of nationalism. By questioning and reimagining historical narratives, they contested the way they were positioned
by the nationalist narratives ultimately disrupting the gendered project
of Chicano nationalism that articulated the subject-citizen of Aztlán as
male. The original Hijas de Cuauhtémoc was a feminist club comprised of largely middle-class women who marched in protest against
the Porfirio Diaz dictatorship in Mexico City at the beginning of the
Revolution (September 11, 1910). They got 1,000 Mexican women to
sign a petition asking for Diaz’ resignation which finally caused his
wife to advise his withdrawal. They continued organizing and a suffragist sentiment solidified early in the Revolution and in May, 1911
when several 100 women signed a letter to interim President de la
Barra which requested votes for women by pointing out that the 1857
Constitution did not bar them from voting since it made no mention
of the sex of the voters. Declaring it to be time that Mexican women
recognized that their “rights and obligations go much farther than just
the home,” a manifesto of the Cuauhtémoc feminist league called for
political enfranchisement and the full emancipation of Mexican women
in the “economic, physical, intellectual and moral struggles.”19 In addition to women’s suffrage, another group by the same name advocated
for women’s right to education and were pivotal actors in the cause of
the Flores Magon brothers whom they assisted by publishing propaganda in the form of newspapers, trafficking arms and supplies, and
safehousing political dissidents. The Hijas de Cuauhtémoc of the 1910s
were part of women’s active role in the revolution and as a movement
for women’s emancipation gained force in Mexico, revolutionary leaders began to support this cause for women’s rights.
This information gave the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc of the 1960s and
1970s a sense of legitimacy as women political agents within the
Nationalist Movement. It authorized them to organize around the
immediate survival of Chicanas on campus and to work on a feminist
political project by showing that it was indeed part of a nationalist tradition. By moving from the mythic terrain of Aztlán into a political
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historical consciousness, the Hijas were able to disrupt the nationalist
meaning of “Chicana.” George Lipsitz argues that,
myth and folklore are not enough. It is the oppressions of history—of
gender, of race, and of class—that make aggrieved populations suspicious
of dominant narratives [of history] . . . Storytelling that leaves history to
the oppressor, that imagines a world of desire detached from the world
of necessity, cannot challenge the hegemony of dominant discourse. But
story-telling that . . . employs the insights and passions of myth and
folklore in the service of revising history, can be a powerful tool of
contestation.20
Lipsitz then suggests another mode of remembrance, that of countermemory, which names the practice the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc utilized
in looking to the past for submerged histories excluded from dominant
historical narratives. By crafting an identity through the Mexican
Revolution and women’s participation, they struggled over the meaning
of Chicano Nationalism and gendered politics. Countermemory, unlike
myth, does not detach itself from a larger historical context. As Lipsitz
defines it, “counter-memory forces revision of existing histories by supplying new perspectives about the past. Countermemory focuses on
localized experiences with oppression, using them to reframe and refocus
dominant narratives purporting to represent universal experience.”21
The Hijas de Cuauhtémoc found historical and political agency by
reclaiming submerged histories of women’s revolutionary participation
and this discovery helped them to develop a sense of countermemory.
One of the most significant interventions the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc
made was that they shifted the historical imaginary and site of political
agency away from the mythic terrain of Aztlán to the revolutionary
participation of women in the Mexican Revolution. By crafting an
identity through this alternative sense of women’s role in movement
politics, they complicated static meanings of gender within Chicano
Nationalism thereby multiplying the forms of gendered subjectivity available to activist women. Their reclamation of earlier feminists and women
political leaders was a way to constitute a historical tradition, gain political legitimacy within Chicano Nationalism and most importantly, create
a new historical imaginary which authorized an autonomous female
political agency. By basing their agency on the historical traditions of
Mexican “feminist foremothers,” Chicanas contested how cultural
icons—la Malinche, la Virgen, la Adelita—circulating in the Chicano
movement functioned as conservative proscriptions for women’s behavior
that enforced dominant patriarchal gender ideology.
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Taking on the name of the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc helped this group of
Chicanas align themselves historically and politically with a decolonial
imaginary. It located them within a genealogy of resistance by invoking Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor who defied colonization and
refused to cede power to the Spanish colonizers. The act of taking on
the name of Hijas de Cuauhtémoc had the effect of subverting the
silencing mechanism or Malinche complex deployed by Chicano
nationalists who felt that a women’s agenda in the movement was divisive. By locating themselves within an untold feminist history of the
Mexican Revolution, they shifted the mode of gendered representation
and the political possibilities for women in the movement. As much a
struggle over politics, creating new spaces and gendered possibilities
for women in the movement involved a struggle over representation
and the meaning of historical narratives. As Stuart Hall reminds us,
those narratives themselves do not merely reflect political identities,
they also produce them. Stuart Hall argues that
. . . it is only within the discursive, and subject to its specific conditions,
limits and modalities, do they have or can they be constructed within
meaning . . ., how things are represented and the “machineries” and
regimes of representation in a culture do play a constitutive, and not
merely a reflexive, after-the-event role. This gives questions of culture
and ideology, and the scenarios of representation—subjectivity, identity,
politics—a formative, not merely an expressive, place in the constitution
of social and political life.22
The Hijas de Cuauhtémoc of the 1960s worked to disrupt the confining discursive formations of gender within nationalism because they
had to, first, constitute the space within this context of meaning to
mount their political challenges to the sexism of the Chicano Student
Movement and, second, mobilize an historical imaginary to confront
the multiple oppressions and forms of discrimination they faced in the
dominant society. They did this by constituting a political subjectivity
that lay within the frame of reference of nationalism while at the same
time shifting, and sometimes subverting, that meaning.
Transfigurative Liberation of the Icons
Published in 1971, the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc newspaper addressed
Mexican women in historical perspective and focused on the
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transfiguration and reclamation of la Soldadera and la Adelita figures
of the Mexican Revolution.23 It included an article on women’s history in Mexico as a liberatory move and historical validation for their
own political activism. Student activist and member of the Hijas de
Cuauhtémoc, Marta López, wrote about “La Mexicana,” and women
in the Mexican Revolution. Her story elucidates the rich historical
consciousness and connections this group used to forge both a
national imaginary of raza women and a tradition which authorized a
space for themselves vis-à-vis their detractors who claimed that
women’s autonomous organizing was anti-Raza/Chicano. As a young
woman, Marta Lopez writes the following of the Mexican feminists at
the turn of the century:
In the Revolution the strength of the Mexicana was seen by all. With
these experiences and an evolving political background she was able to
organize herself into lasting women’s groups . . . Organizations working directly with the community worked hand in hand with those
involved in women’s legal rights. One of the outstanding political
organizations was Hijas de Cuautémoc. It is after them that we have
named our paper.24
Previously La Soldadera was portrayed as a loyal camp follower or as
a woman who “stands by her man” to provide comfort to the revolutionary hero. She was construed as a foot soldier of the movement
who would follow the nationalist line on the ground level. The resignification of the image of the Soldadera through historical narratives
was part of the production of a gendered revolutionary historical
agency and part of a larger discursive struggle. The newspaper
began to craft new genealogies of revolutionary women who were
worked for women’s liberation within the framework of the larger
revolution.25
Imaged Communities: Mapping the Gendered
Political Scripts of the Chicano Movement
through a Political Iconography
What I want to do now is to map a visual cultural history of the
production of the Nueva Chicana of the 1960s and 1970s through a
politicized iconography and circulation of these images in the Chicano
Movement print culture. The production of a politicized historical subjectivity of what was termed in the movement as the Nueva Chicana
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was created, in part, through the images circulated in newspapers,
political pamphlets, photos, and film media. I focus on this visual cultural history and these modes of representation because images are
ideological and political and were important coordinates within the
struggle for gender equality in the Chicano movement.
The 1967 Chicano historical epic, Yo Soy Joaquín, written by Rodolfo
“Corky” Gonzales, founder of the Civil Rights organization Crusade
for Justice in Denver, Colorado was widely read, circulated, and
performed at rallies and by teatro groups as the self-proclaimed, “epic
of the Mexican American people.”26 Rather than focus on an analysis of
the written text itself which other Chicano scholars have done,27 I examine the way gender was deployed in the visual images that accompany
this popular text as an example of Chicano nationalist iconography.
I use this text as a series of establishing shots to illustrate the way the
iconography of nationalism operated within this time period. I discuss
the print images of Yo Soy Joaquín because it circulated widely in movement print culture by mass photocopying and popular distribution and
was extremely popular among activists because it articulated in poetic
form, the emerging ideology of Chicano cultural nationalism. The
introduction to the 1972 edition speaks to this broad circulation:
Since 1967, the Crusade for Justice has published in mimeographed,
photocopied, and printed editions, over 100,000 copies which have
been given away or sold . . . I am Joaquín has been reproduced by
numerous Chicano Press newspapers, which print 10,000 to 20,000
copy editions . . . it has been copied and reproduced by student groups,
farm workers organizations, teachers, barrio groups, professionals and
workers (all sectors of Aztlán).
Through the print circulation of images in Yo Soy Joaquín, I analyze
some of the more dominant visual tropes that both produce and
maintain the relations of gender in Chicano movement political
culture and organizational life. My rendering examines both the
formal and ideological aspects of these images as well as considers the
way in which they were used as a pedagogy of nationalism. I am interested in the visual processes by which the iconography of nationalism
is gendered. Again, this reinforces the idea that these visual tropes are
not just “representations” of what already exists within Chicano culture
but rather, political and cultural practices which play a constitutive role
in the domain of culture.
The images in Yo Soy Joaquín depict how revolutionary male prototypes were constituted and circulated in the movement. These visual
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images were recoded over and over until these visual tropes of the
worker, pachuco/cholo/street warrior, Brown Beret, farm worker
became archetypes of Chicano nationalism visually encoding the political subjectivity of the movement as male. Other visual tropes of the
revolutionary male hero and the familia as allegory for the movement
established the dominant mode of address and representational strategy of the Chicano movement. The images, photographic slides, and
illustrative drawings depict the creation of movement archetypes
through icons of the pachuco, the stoic worker or romanticized revolutionary, which came to constitute a field of subject position where
la Raza (the people), the “heroes” of the people, and the national subject were viewed as male. This visual field marginalized women’s political subjectivity to that of the suffering witnesses to historic
oppression, the bearers of pain and cultural survival, revolutionary
mothers or supporters/helpmates to revolutionary male leaders. Rosa
Linda Fregoso argues these images posit
. . . a “collective” cultural identity that is singularly male-centered.
Multiple identities are subsumed into a collectivity whose narrative
voice is enacted in this historical male subject, Joaquín. The males
who inform Chicano cultural identity have names (Cuauhtémoc,
Moctezuma, Juan Diego, and so on), but the females are nameless
abstractions. Indeed, as opposed to appearing as historical subjects,
women are positioned as the metaphors for the emotive side of Chicano
Collective cultural identity, as “faithful” wives or “suffering” Mexican
mothers.28
Nationalist iconography images the subject-citizen of the nation (Aztlán)
as male. The cover of Yo Soy Joaquín illustrates the reclamation of
subaltern masculinities—pachucos, cholos, homeboys—working-class
young men as the privileged site of political subjectivity. The book features images of Brown Berets from what I call the Che Guevara Low
Shot because low shots valorize the young militant man as revolutionary
subject/hero. It shows the masculinized pride of la Raza (and its resonance, borrowing, and transforming of Black Panther and Young Lord
images of resistance). As the coinciding poem states, having nothing
more than our “bold with machismo” stance and courage in the face of
oppression. Another photo depicts the family as the structuring
metaphor for la Raza and for the movement as a whole. Visually, the
man is centered and the photograph’s formal and gendered composition elucidates the hierarchy of power. Several other images depict the
family as la Raza or el movimiento as a prevalent visual trope that
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helped to produce expectations about leadership and power within
the movement. The man in the image (Chávez) leads his people, the
women, visually, follow. Another image combines both visual tropes by
depicting “revolutionary hero” as the patriarchal head of family.
The text is full of representations of individual men who represent
the subjects of la causa creating the visual tropes of the citizen/subjects
of Aztlán as the stoic worker, protestor, or revolutionary hero.
Visually they are idealized through low shots and lighting to elucidate
the humbleness of the people (who are men) and the righteousness of
their struggle. The way the retelling of the epic past is staged in the text
functions to establish male lineage and revolutionary legacy within the
Chicano movement through masculinist notions of historical subjectivity. One photo illustrates the reclamation of Indigenous roots
within the framework of the nation and a national project of Mexico
that has flattened out racial/ethnic difference. These roots are
inscribed on the bodies of the man sitting below a portrait of Benito
Juárez. The framing device of Juárez delineates male lineage and
ancestral struggle. The images of women in Yo Soy Joaquín are based
on visual tropes that echo many of the ideological sentiments forwarded by the movement. Women are represented as Martyrs, Virgins,
or Mothers. They are not political subjects; not inscribed as subjectcitizens of Aztlán. Women are literally (and visually martyred as)
the bearers of the pain of injustice. Visually women are configured as
mothers of the people (as the text gives voice to the women, “I shed
tears of anguish as I see my children” depicting idealized motherhood
instead of what women in the movement really did—i.e., engaged in
union organizing or demanded child care).
Beyond the Revolutionary (m)Other
Perhaps the most enduring images within the symbolic economy of
nationalism is an image I call the Revolutionary (m)Other. This image
represents the way in which women are figured as part of the revolution,
but only in reproductive ways. Their role is defined by reproducing the
nation and fighting on behalf of their sons. The Revolutionary
(m)Other images in Yo Soy Joaquín are accompanied by the text:
“I must fight and win this struggle for my sons.” The image of the
Revolutionary (m)Other is common in national liberation struggles
that seek to locate women’s revolutionary agency within motherhood.
To figure women and their participation into the revolutionary
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process women were represented not just as mothers of the nation as
standard fare but mothers of new nation bearing arms of revolutionary struggle. The image of the revolutionary (m)Other in the Cuban
and Nicaraguan cases depict a woman with a machine gun over one
shoulder as she cradles and nurses a baby at her breast such as those
featured on AMNLAE posters in Nicaragua or on billboards in Cuba;
they protect the revolution while they bear the new nation. The image
of Revolutionary (m)Others epitomizes the way women’s bodies stand
in for the nation metaphorically and reveal the contradictions and
compliticies between colonialism and nationalism’s deployment of
women’s bodies in the (post)colonial project.29
I want to now turn my gaze to the ways Chicanas represented
themselves and how Chicana feminists refigured themselves through
the circulation and production of their own images. The role of selfrepresentation can not be underestimated. For even when Chicanas
did not actually produce or take the photographs, the way they chose
to utilize them, figure them in their publications, circulate them
within their existing print communities and negotiate the terms on
which they would constitute an image(d) community tell a lot about
the development of both Chicana cultural practice and subject
formation.30
One of the most revealing visual patterns in the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc
newspaper is that more than just the historic photos and drawings
contributed by students, the photos taken at conferences and events
are displayed in collage format, thereby creating a collective Chicana
subject of resistance rather than individual icons. Within Chicana
newspapers the photojournalism selected and displayed illustrate that
women represented themselves differently. They put themselves into
the narrative of revolution but instead of using singular low shot images,
they used the effect of photo collage to create a sense of sisterhood and
collaboration, creating visually the forms of female and feminist
solidarity that they sought to create in their political work. The different use of visuality and images of revolutionary participation created
a different mode of address within Chicano movement visual culture
which enlisted or hailed women into the project of liberation on their
own terms. This new iconography encouraged women’s participation,
created new forms of political subjectivity based on an historical consciousness of women’s participation in the Mexican Revolution and
through other visual techniques like collage, posited a female sense of
solidarity and collectivity.
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Political Icons and Political Subjectivity
What I propose is that we see iconography as a site of struggle over the
terms in which women participated in the Chicano movement and
were included within its discourses. Instead of just reclaiming
women’s participation in the movement and illustrating female icons,
I want to complicate our understanding of the cultural work of political iconography and read the struggle around these icons as visual
negotiations of political subjectivity, forms of political participation,
and the way spaces of belonging were articulated. The figure of the
Soldadera had many kinds of signifying possibilities and was a site of
struggle over the meaning of gender within the movement. Sometimes
the image of the Soldadera, especially the Adelita figure, represented the
revolutionary sweetheart whose role was to inspire and support their
compañeros. This revolutionary sweetheart image circulated in movement culture and more broadly within Chicano popular culture, even
airbrushed on customized cars and tattooed on backs and arms.31
Other images of the Soldadera featured the self-abnegating foot
soldiers of the movement who did the reproductive and back room
labor of the movement, never questioned their role and upon whose
bodies were projected the nationalist project and Chicano pride.
The figure of the Soldadera was also widely reclaimed by women
and Chicana feminists to signify women’s historic role in revolution
and the idea that women’s participation, leadership and autonomous
agenda was not foreign to the culture, selling out the movement, or
being white washed. The Hijas de Cuauhtémoc played a formative role
in seeking and producing new forms of knowledge about themselves
as Chicanas because they had grown tired of the faded yellow images of
Aztec poster princesses that the movement held up to them us mirrors.
For example, Anna NietoGomez, along with other Los Angeles-based
activists, edited the first journal of Chicana scholarship, Encuentro
Femenil, which was outgrowth of the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc newspaper.
In one of the editors’ introduction to the journal, it read:
In 1969, there was a great eagerness to experience the first Chicano
Studies classes. The women were very excited to learn about their
heritage both as Chicanos and as mujeres. However, the women were
very disappointed to discover that neither Chicano history, Mexican history, nor Chicano literature included any measurable material on
the mujer. At best she would be referred to mystically as “la India,” the
bulwark of the family, or she would be referred to romantically as “la
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Adelita,” “la Soldadera” of the movement. La mujer either had a baby in
her arms or a rifle in her hand or both. But few dealt with the identity of
la mujer in the family, or even knew who was “la Adelita.” They were
merely symbols for her to look towards, and if she was any Chicana at
all, the spirit of either model was expected to appear instinctively.32
Chicana feminists established discursive and visual spaces in which to
negotiate alternative subjectivities by reworking the icons and cultural
narratives of the Chicano movement. This tradition “of working
simultaneously within and against dominant cultural” within an overall project of reclamation has been expanded and theorized by cultural
critic, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, in her study of the representational
strategies deployed by Chicana lesbians.33 In theorizing of the “cultural specificity of the lesbianization of the heterosexual icons of popular culture,” within Latina cultural production, she calls upon what
Amalia Mesa Baines calls “the transfigurative liberation of the icon.”34
By refiguring the symbols of nationalist patrimony (cultural legacy),
the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc helped to change the hailing mechanism by
setting up an alternative feminist apparatus of interpellation of the
subject of Aztlán. This politics of disidentification did not reproduce
the same national symbols, but engaged in a resignifying practice of
reworking a figure such as Cuauhtémoc in order to create or recall a
women’s “revolutionary legacy.” They built a new discourse of Chicana
femenismo by busting the sutures of Chicano nationalist discourse and
refigured an alternative genealogy of the revolutionary participation
by shifting the historical imaginary of the Chicano movement.
Besides taking on the name of an earlier Mexican feminist organization, the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc newspaper began transforming the
figure of the Soldadera reclaiming it through the publication of
archival photos and reappropriating nationalist iconography. One
way the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc reworked nationalist imagery was on
the cover page of one of their newspaper editions which features a
drawing of a woman liberating herself from a net that represents
oppression. There is the figure of the eagle that overshadows the
woman as she uses her machete to cut herself free. The meaning of the
image is ambiguous as it is unclear if she is fighting for the nation
or liberating herself from the fetters of the nation. Beyond photos of
la Soldadera of the Mexican Revolution, other images also positioned
women as participants in the revolution. One photo in particular
looks over the shoulder of a Chicana Activist while she reads a newspaper with a huge masthead declaring “Mujer Como Revolucionaria.”
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189
This image accompanies the manifestos and position papers produced
at the Los Angeles Chicana Regional Conference, which was a
regional preparatory conference for the first-ever-national Chicana
conference in Houston in 1971. These images change the dominant
tropes within the pedagogy of the nationalism to suggest that this
revolucionaria has her own sense of political agency and is not a
naturalized male subject of the movement but is gaining knowledge
about herself as a political subject.
Several of the images within women’s newspapers also dialogically
rework and engender some of the visual tropes that establish male
revolutionary patrimony in the Chicano movement. In another report
back from the Chicana Regional Conference, there is a second image
that references how women (re)imaged themselves into the legacy of
struggle. This shot uses a framing device similar to that referencing the
historical legacy of Benito Juárez photo mentioned earlier. Yet, this
image begins to disrupt the male lineage of nationalist patrimony; it
depicts a Chicana Brown Beret as the revolutionary descendent of Che
Guevara, as she sits below his larger-than life photo. Other images of
women that were dialogically engaged and resignified other popularized
images of women’s passivity. Specifically the image of the Martyr was
invoked by women wearing rebozos on their heads but the women are
(re)presented in an active position on the verge of action—often
appearing as if they carried arms or some weapon of resistance under
their rebozos.
These images map the migration from suffering, submission, or
passivity to active subjects of history and politics. These images signal
the emergence of the iconography of la Nueva Chicana and were common figures in the visual and discursive struggle Chicana Feminists
engaged within the imaged community of the nation. They created
new images, reworked older more traditional representations and used
innovative designs to create a new subjectivity. The mode of photo
layout and collage—almost like a family album—in the movement
newspapers, are illustrative of how Chicanas image themselves collectively. The sequence of images shows the historic development of an
iconography of the New Chicana and traces the ways in which
women’s agency and political subjectivities were constituted in a new
imaged(d) community of Chicana feminists.
Both the political and the cultural work done by the Hijas de
Cuauhtémoc created a crisis within the signifying systems of nationalism to break the sign function of various figures of woman thereby
creating disorder in the symbolic order of Nationalism. This double
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Maylei Blackwell
act of disarticulation and resignification occurred around particular
signifiers of woman deployed by Chicano nationalist discourse.
Instead of performing the typecast roles for Chicanas, they retrofitted
them to change the gendered hailing mechanism (or the way women
were called into) the project of liberation. In addition to the early
resignification of the Adelita figure by the Hijas de Cuauhtémoc,
Chicana feminists have had a long-standing cultural project of
reworking Malinche.35 Artists like Yolanda Lopez, Ester Hernandez
and more recently, Alma Lopez, all rework the signifying possibilities
for la Virgen de Guadalupe around women’s agency, resistance and
sexuality. Chicana lesbian feminist artists have been especially active
in creating new signifying possibilities for female icons, expanding the
range of meanings to include even resignifying the figure of the Virgen
as a matrix of power and desire or the vulva. This form of cultural
work is a form of retrofitted memory because it changes the relationship Chicanas have as historical subjects to the sexed and gendered narratives of the past. In an important essay, Laura Pérez explores these
early and continuing acts of resignification that articulated a kind of
feminism within nationalism, but they were the roots of a political
movement that eventually moved between nationalist imaginaries and
then beyond them.36 This cultural work has revealed and disrupted the
virgin/whore dichotomy and engendered the very symbols of national
liberation. Articulating new modes of representation within movement iconography, political discourse, and historical memory played a
constitutive role in engendering a space for Chicanas in the movement
opening the way for new political possibilities.
The Iconography of the Nueva Chicana reworks the gendered
nationalist constructions of the Adelita and Revolucionaria movement
figures, forges an image(d) community of Chicana feminist counterpublics by representing themselves in collectivity, and deploys different
frames of reference and modes of address in its visual strategies. By
tracing the development of Nueva Chicana iconographic practices, we
can see how the images of the movement Martyr, the mother and revolutionary (m)Other, the Soldadera, and Revolucionaria are alternatively imaged in ways that shift the nationalist representational
regime. These images serve to multiply the possible subject positions
and options for women in the movement. This essay has begun to map
the historic development of the image(d) community of the Nueva
Chicana, which served to forge new social and political spaces.
Chicano art critic, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto’s discusses the transformative role of new cultural productions and their circulation in public
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191
cultures which he argues opens up new social spaces and oppositional
publics.37
Conclusion: Continued Movement,
Resurfacing Icons, and the Politics of
Re-Membering and Forgetting
The photo of the woman bearing bandoleras discussed in this essay
continues to circulate, not just in Chicana/o Studies, but within popular
culture, music culture, and political culture. But what happens in the
circulation and migration of this image? Because movement histories
are sites of contemporary identity construction and maintenance, we
must be attentive to how modes of remembrance are structured by
gender, sexuality, and relations of power in ways that are bound by the
historical conjunctures that produce them. In Chicano movement histories, the organizers and organizations that articulated Chicana political subject positions have been erased or relegated to the margins of
the cosmology of masculinity—the mode of gender through which
Chicano liberation was initially articulated. Although this was immediately challenged, these challenges and the feminist history of
Chicana struggles with the movement have been excluded. Because the
“Movement” is constructed as a monolithic and unitary narrative of
origins where the often-bitter struggles of gender and sexuality are forgotten, when it is invoked in an act of remembrance these same structures of gender are reenacted.
When these images circulate in popular culture, they often come to
stand in for the movement themselves and in this instance, the erasure
of women in the movement. They are images that evoke powerful narratives that have traveled through time and they testify to the pull and
power of Chicano nationalism. Yet, often they erase the mass participation of women in radical movements of the 1960s and the 1970s as
well as the simultaneous struggles around gender and sexuality that
women engaged in while in those movements. Activist, scholar, and
historian Angela Y. Davis has written a critical reflection of the ways
in which her own image is associated with a kind of a kind of Black
nationalism that she herself contested. “What I am trying to suggest is
that contemporary representations of nationalism in AfricanAmerican and diasporic popular culture are far too frequently reifications of a very complex and contradictory project that had
emancipatory moment leading beyond itself.” Suggesting that we
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explore the “suppressed moments of the history of sixties nationalisms,”38 Davis calls upon the still revolutionary potential of the
images, icons, and narratives of the 1960s and the 1970s as they circulate in popular culture when they accurately portray the complexity
of those political traditions and legacies. “Young people with ‘nationalist’ proclivities ought, at least, have the opportunity to choose which
tradition of nationalism they will embrace. How will they position
themselves en masse in defense of women’s rights and in defense of gay
rights if they are not aware of the historical precedents for such positionings?”39 In recovering the suppressed feminist history of the
Chicano movement, the visual terrain is a critical aspect of understanding the role, political work, and the legacy of Chicanas in the
movement. The visual terrain is critical because if history is only
knowable through representation, we can also study representation as
a site of historicity and a place in which historical subjectivities were
imaged and imagined.
Notes
1. Amalia Mesa-Baines, “El Mundo Femenino: Chicana Artists of the
Movement—A Commentary on Development and Production,” in Chicano
Art: Resistance and Affirmation (Los Angeles: Wright Art Gallery, UCLA,
1991), 131–140.
2. See also, the important essay by Laura Elisa Pérez that examines feminist representational practices and Chicano Nationalism: “El desorden, Nationalism, and
Chicana/o Aesthetics,” in Between Woman and National: Nationalisms,
Transnational Feminisms and the State, edited by Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón,
and Minoo Moallem (Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1999), 19–46.
3. In this photo, there is a man in the background of the photo who seems like he is
attempting to talk with the woman. She looks like she is at a political rally; listening to a speaker perhaps. Is the young man propositioning the young woman?
In most circulations of this photo, the background has been cropped out. Just as
in most movement histories, narratives, and even within the circulation of movement icons, the background of the lived working and organizing conditions of
women in the movement, or even their stories, have been cropped out.
4. Ibid., 7.
5. See Armando B. Rendon, Chicano Manifesto (New York: Macmillan Company,
1971); Alfredo Mirandé, Hobres y machos: Masculinity and Latino Culture
(Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997).
6. See Chicano Power! Latin Rock in the USA, 1968–1976: 2 CD Set & 40 Page
Booklet. Soul Jazz Records CD 39, Released 1999. For contemporary examples
of how this image is being circulated in political art on T-shirts and stickers, see
the politically conscious social justice art of Faviana Rodriquez at
⬍www.faviana.com/port_other/other1.php⬎ (site visited on May 15, 2004).
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193
7. Under the direction of Chicana activist and theorist Anna NietoGomez, the
Hijas de Cuauhtémoc negotiated both the Chicano cultural nationalism of
the 1960 and the 1970s and the overlaying simultaneous locations of gender,
class race, and sexuality by creating a Chicana feminist counterpublic through
gendered print culture, campus and community political organizing, crossregional Chicana feminist dialogue, and by reworking and engendering the
political icons of Chicano nationalism. They began organizing in 1968 and
began publishing their newspaper in 1971.
8. I first presented these findings on movement visual culture in 1996 at the
NACCS conference in a paper entitled, “Mapping the Iconography of La
Nueva Chicana in and through Nationalist Terrains.” I explored how
Chicanas reclaimed an earlier tradition of Mexican feminism at the turn of the
twentieth century, specifically by reclaiming narratives and images of female
participants in the Mexican revolution.
9. For Vicki Ruiz’s rich discussion, see “La Nueva Chicana: Women and the
Movement,” in From Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in TwentiethCentury America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 111–112
specifically discuss the figure of la Soldadera.
10. See Kaye Brigal, “Our Culture Hell”, unpublished movement manuscript.
11. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and
Spread of Nationalism, Revised edition (London: Verso, 1991).
12. For example, see Chandra Mohanty’s use of Anderson’s “imagined communities” in her Introduction to Third World Politics and the Politics of Feminism,
ed Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991).
13. Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments. Colonial and Postcolonial
Histories. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 7.
14. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in Black Cultural
Studies. (London: Routledge, 1994), 64–65 (italics in the original).
15. Chicana film scholar, Rosa Linda Fregoso, discusses the imaginative possibility of film stating that “the Chicano nation [is] captured in these films represents an ‘imagined community.’ Far from fabricating or inventing a
community, Chicana and Chicanos have reinvented (imagined anew) a ‘community’ of Chicanos and Chicanas.” The Bronze Screen: Chicana and
Chicano Film Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993,
xxiii. For a different rendering of the ways in which alternative discursive formations cause a crisis the system of signification and mode of address of a
national culture, see Homi K. Bhabha, “DissemiNation: time, narrative, and
the margins of the modern nation,” in Nation and Narration (New York:
Routledge, 1990), 297.
16. Stuart Hall, “The Question of Cultural Identity,” in Modernity and Its
Futures, edited by S. Hall, D. Held, and T. McGrew (Cambridge: Polity Press),
274–316.
17. Ibid.
18. See her groundbreaking work by the same title. Emma Pérez, Sexing the
Decolonial Imaginary: Writing Chicanas into History (Bloomington, Indiana:
Indiana University Press), 1999.
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19. Quoted in Fredrick Turder, The Dynamic of Mexican Nationalism (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 193.
20. George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular
Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 213.
21. Ibid., 213.
22. Ibid., 27.
23. See, Norma Cantú’s, “Women, Then and Now: An Analysis of the Adelita
Image versus the Chicana as Political Writer and Philosopher,” in Chicana
Voices, edited by Teresa Córdova et al. (Austin: Center for Mexican American
Studies (CMAS), University of Texas), 8–10. Also, several Chicana and
Mexicana scholars have done in-depth research on the role of women in the
Mexican Revolution. See Elizabeth Salsas (UT Press, 1990) and Ana Lau
(Planeta, 1987).
24. Marta Lopez, “La Mexicana,” Hijas de Cuauhtémoc, n.d. First Issue (early
1971).
25. See Vicki Ruiz, Out of the Shadows: Mexican Women in Twentieth Century
America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), Chapter five for a larger
discussion of the soldadera contextualized within the movement.
26. Gonzales, I am Joaquín/Yo Soy Joaquín: An Epic Poem (with a chronology of
people and events in Mexican and Mexican American history) (New York:
Bantam Books, 1972).
27. For a discussion of the ways in which Yo Soy Joaquín functioned in the
Chicano Movement as a narrative of racial unity, see Angie Chabram
Dernersesian’s “ ‘Chicana! Rican? No, Chicana-Riqueña!’ Refashioning the
Transnational Connection,” in Multiculturalism: A Critical Reader, edited by
David Theo Goldberg (Cambridge: Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1994), 269–295; and
for a Chicano literary history of this text see, Rafael Pérez-Torres, Movements
in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against Margins (Cambridge: The
Cambridge University Press, 1995).
28. Fregoso, The Bronze Screen, 6.
29. See, Anne McClintock, Aamir Mufti, and Ella Shohat, eds., Dangerous
Liaisons: Gender, Nation, and Postcolonial Perspectives (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press), 1997.
30. Print Culture and its visual images were often the basis of early Chicano film.
Yo Soy Joaquín was made into a film directed by Luis Valdez in 1969 and
Anna NietoGomez’s “Chicana Feminist Sideshow” was the basis for the 1976
film La Chicana, directed by Sylvia Morales who was assisted by another
Hijas de Cuauhtémoc member, Cindy Honesto. Rosa Linda Fregoso has developed an incisive comparative rendering of these two films in her book, Bronze
Screen: Chicana and Chicano Film Culture.
31. The most common of this genre of image is a drawing of a woman on one
knee, holding a rifle, her abundant chest crossed with bandoleras. This image
is highly sexualized as the center of the image is the visibility of her erect
nipples, her hair is tossed, and her mouth and lips are posed seductively in an
half opened position.
32. “Introduction,” Encuentro Femenil, 1(2), 1974: 4.
Bearing Bandoleras
195
33. Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, “The Lesbian Body in Latin Cultural Production,”
in ¿Entiendes? Queer Readings, Hispanic Writings, edited by Emilie L.
Bergmann and Paul Jullian Smith (London: Duke University Press, 1995), 182.
34. Amalia Mesa-Baines, “El Mundo Femenino: Chicana Artists of the
Movement—A Commentary on Development and Production,” in Chicano
Art: Resistance and Affirmation (Los Angeles: Wright Art Gallery, UCLA,
1991), 131–140.
35. See Adelaida R. del Castillo, “Malintzin Tenepal: A Preliminary Look into a
New Perspective,” in Essays on La Mujer, edited by Rosaura Sánchez and
Rosa Martiníz Cruz (Los Angeles, CA: Chicano Studies Center Publications,
University of California, Los Angeles, 1977); Cordelia Candelaria, “La
Malinche, Feminist Prototype,” Frontiers, 5(2), 1980: 1–6; Norma Alarcón,
“Traddutora, Traditora: A Paradigmatic Figure of Chicana Feminism.” Cultural
Critique, 13, Fall 1989: 57–87.
36. Laura Elisa Pérez, “El desorden, Nationalism, and Chicana/o Aesthetics,” in
Between Woman and National: Nationalisms, Transnational Feminisms and
the State, edited by Caren Kaplan, Norma Alarcón, and Minoo Moallem
(Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1999), 19–46.
37. Tómas Ybarra-Frausto, “Interview with Tómas Ybarra-Frausto: The Chicano
Movement in a Multicultural/Multinational Society,” in On Edge: The Crisis
of Contemporary Latin American Culture, edited by George Yúdice, Jean
Franco, and Juan Flores (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992),
207–216.
38. According to Angela Y. Davis in her essay, “Black Nationalism: The Sixties
and the Nineties,” in Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent (Seattle,
WA: Bay Press, 1992), 317–324, key among these is Huey Newton’s urging an
end of verbal gay bashing and an examination of Black male sexuality after
Jean Genet’s sojourn with the BPP.
39. Ibid.
10
Aztec Princess Still at Large
Representations of Native women in the United States and Mexico are
largely limited to the mythologies of the Indian Princess.1 In history
and popular culture of the United States and Mexico, she is
Pocahontas or La Malinche.2 In everyday encounters she’s more like
the figure in the poem by Diane Burns (Anishinabe/Chemehuevi),
“Sure You Can Ask Me a Personal Question”:
Your great grandmother, huh?
An Indian Princess, huh?
Hair down to there?
Let me guess. Cherokee?
As Peter Hulme argues, “The major feature of this myth is the ideal of
cultural harmony through romance” (141). In his discussion of the
photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, Kobena Mercer defines stereotype as “a fixed way of seeing that freezes the flux of experience”
(174). In my discussion of Robert Buitrón’s photograph Ixta Ponders
Leverage Buyout (figure 10.1), I discuss this freezing of experience in
relation to a mythic Indian princess, whose image circulates primarily
in Mexican and Chicano popular cultures.
Buitrón’s photograph immediately engages the viewer with fantasies
about Native American women. A dark-haired woman sits at a table in
the corporate boardroom, surrounded by mature White males. She
wears a dark business suit with a high collar. She is the only one of the
nine people in the photograph facing the viewer and her gaze is serious.
She wears an enormous feathered headdress, which marks her as Indian.
198
Figure 10.1 “Ixta Ponders Leverage Buyout,” Robert Buitrón, 1989.
As the title of the photograph suggests, Buitrón is not only concerned
with Anglo American stereotypes about Indian women, but also with
Mexican and Chicano/a fantasies about them. “Ixta Ponders Leverage
Buyout” identifies the woman as the legendary Aztec princess
Ixtacihuátl. According Mexican legend, Ixta—Ixtacihuátl—was an
Aztec princess who fell in love with Popo—Popocatépetl—a low-born
warrior from a rival tribe. To win Ixta’s hand in marriage, Popo goes
off to battle to prove his valor. Ixta receives erroneous reports of his
death in battle and kills herself. Popo returns victorious, finds only
Ixta’s body, and takes her to the mountains where he crouches beside her,
burning incense and mourning her eternally. This is a story of the origin
of the volcanoes Ixtacihuátl and Popocatépetl, which loom above
Mexico City. Like the stories of Pocahontas and La Malinche, this legend
owes much of its current form to the nineteenth-century constructions of
national identity through a national mythology.
In contemporary Chicano and Mexican cultures, this legend circulates primarily through the calendar paintings of Mexican artist Jesus
Helguera, dating from the 1940s and the 1950s. These paintings
dramatize scenes from Mexican myth and history: romantic tales of
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the tragic love of the Aztec Princess Ixtacihuátl and her lover
Popocatépetl, of “Amor Indio.”3 They form a visual link between
modern Mexicanos (and by extension Chicanas/os) and the Aztec
heroes of a bygone era.
Helguera often combined Maxfield Parrish sunsets with Indian
princesses resembling Mexican actresses Lucha Reyes and Dolores Del
Rio, and settings that owe more to Tinseltown than to Tenochtitlan.
The paintings feature a muscular and active Aztec warrior carrying or
mourning the scantily clad and voluptuous body of an Aztec princess.
This image inscribes particular fantasies about essential Mexican
identities: the male is cast in the subject position, a virile and potent
warrior, while the female is an object of visual pleasure, a voluptuous
receptive body.
It is important to note that representations of Ixtacihuátl render her
as passive and sexualized. Helguera’s series of calendar paintings—
including Amor Indio, Gesto Azteca, Grandeza Azteca, Ixtacihuátl,
and La Leyenda de los Volcanes—depict the Indian princess with her
eyes closed and her body in various stages of undress. Even when fully
clothed, her garments are distinct in their transparency and the
emphasis they place on her erect nipples.
Tomás Ybarra-Frausto discusses the Aztec imagery of these
calendars in the catalog to the 1986 exhibit Chicano Expressions:
A New View in American Art. He sees them as a significant source of
inspiration for Chicano artists, who “emphasized forms of visual
expression functioning as integral elements of the decorative scheme in
the home environment” (21). Specifically, Ybarra-Frausto discusses
“two pervasive graphic traditions . . . exemplified by the almanaque
(calendar) and the estampa religiosa (religious imagery).”
Traditionally, the annual almanaque is given to favorite customers by
local merchants. . . . Although created as advertisements, the almanaques
exclude any specific product from the visual representation itself.
Rather, the illustrations often feature Mexican genre scenes, interpretations of indigenous myths [such as] the Aztec warrior holding a dead
maiden in his arm . . . a pictorial representation of the myth of
Ixtacihuátl and Popocatépetl made famous by the Mexican calendar
artist Jesús Helguera. These . . . illustrations are often saved and displayed
as household icons. (21)
These calendars are available in the United States from restaurants,
hair salons, gift shops, “mexicatessens,” botanicas, and auto mechanics as well as from Chicana/o art galleries. Not only are the Helguera
200
calendars themselves pervasive, but their themes are also recreated by
other artists.4
Helguera’s calendar paintings continue to circulate widely, so much
so that Ixta and Popo have found their way into popular culture,
through murals, custom car murals and detailing, T-shirts, ceramics,
and black velvet paintings. Chicana and Chicano artists regularly
invoke Helguera’s imagery in their representations of Chicano/a culture. Why are these images so prevalent? What pleasures are derived
from viewing the sleeping or dead body of the Aztec Princess? On the
one hand, it may mark a nostalgia for the lost ideal of pre-Columbian
culture. Popo mourns his lost love, dead by her own hand before their
wedding, and contemporary Chicanos mourn the lost “empire” of the
Aztecs. At the same time, the sensual detailing of Ixta’s body seems to
represent a disavowal of colonial violence. The first part of that disavowal would state, I know very well that Indians died horrible deaths
in the colonial institution of New-Spain-which-became-Mexico. Yet,
the disavowal continues, I prefer to imagine Indian death as the
romantic tale of tragic love, through the visually pleasing image of
Ixta’s body. The disassociation of Ixta’s death from colonial violence is
crucial to the success of both the image and the legend. Finally, the
death of Ixta is a visual signifier of the constant reinvention of Native
Mexicans as extinct: Native Mexicans are represented as alwaysalready dead. As Norma Alarcón has argued, “the historical founding
moment of the construction of [national Mexican] mestizo subjectivity entails the rejection and denial of the dark Indian Mother as
Indian . . . and to actually deny the Indian position even as that position is visually stylized and represented in the making of the fatherland” (“Chicana Feminism” 374). Thus the construction of the
nationalist subject as mestizo—and as the legitimate inheritor of
Mexico—rests on this depiction of Aztecs as extinct, and as wholly
separate from contemporary indigenous populations and social
movements.
Ybarra-Frausto’s reference to the calendars as “integral elements of
the decorative scheme in the home environment” provides entry into a
new theorization of the calendars. According to Victor Burgin,
Photographs are not seen by deliberate choice, they have no special
space or time allotted to them, they are apparently (an important
qualification) provided free of charge—photographs offer themselves
gratuitously; whereas paintings and films readily present themselves
201
to critical attention as objects, photographs are received rather as
environment. (“Looking at Photographs” 143)
I argue that Helguera’s paintings of Ixta and Popo—like photographs—
are received as environment, and that this distinction is important to
understanding the significance of Buitrón’s photograph Ixta Ponders
Leverage Buyout.
Buitrón is clearly engaging this popular representation of Ixta, the
Aztec princess, even as he problematizes it. In the background of the
photograph, on the dark walls of the boardroom, hang four formal oil
portraits. All of the portraits are of mature White men in business suits.
These four paintings, then, make up a series that seems to represent the
legacy of Anglo men in the boardroom. There is a fifth picture in the
series, one which has no ornate frame: a paper calendar is tacked up,
the central image of which is Helguera’s, Gesto Azteca, which features
Popo holding Ixta’s body in his arms. Below the painting, the calendar
features an advertisement for “La Fortuna” restaurant.
Ixta Ponders Leverage Buyout is part of Buitrón’s 1989 photographic series The Legend of Ixtaccihuatl y Popocatepetal: twelve
photographs compiled in a printed wall calendar. Buitrón deliberately
engages Helguera’s calendar paintings through narrative photography
that combines social commentary with a rasquache aesthetic.
Although often interpreted simply as “Mexican kitsch,” to be rasquache
means, in a sense, to revel in those aspects of working-class MexicanAmerican culture that are most devalued by the bourgeois aesthetics of
American hegemonic culture. Rasquachísmo delights in its own excessive hybridity. It is the sombrero embroidered in sequins, it is the lowrider car with air-brushed detailing, it is the purple house, the
Chihuahua, and the black velvet painting. Yet Buitrón’s photograph
does not merely represent the rasquache aesthetic: by incorporating
the physical presence of one of Helguera’s calendars, it also participates in rasquachísmo by presenting itself as just such a calendar.
The photograph and its title highlights simultaneous stereotypes
of Native American women, stereotypes held by both Mexicans/
Chicanos and Anglo Americans. The Mexican/Chicano stereotype is
of Ixtacihuátl, the dead maiden in the arms of her warrior lover. The
Anglo American stereotype images Native Americans as “caught
between two worlds”: the old traditional world, symbolized by
the feathered headdress and the modern-day world, symbolized by the
woman’s power suit.
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Legacy of the Aztec Princess
We are Ixtacihuatls,
sleeping, snowcapped volcanoes
buried alive in myths
princesses with the name of a warrior
on our lips
––Ana Castillo
An early feminist reading of the legend of Ixta and Popo might
contend that it buries Chicanas “beneath the weight of a subjectposition meant to be self-sacrificing and reverent” (Rafael PérezTorres, 192). Chicana and Chicano artists and writers who take up
Ixtacihuátl have often done so primarily in terms of what Kobena
Mercer describes as “binary alternatives between positive and negative
images” (172): either protesting the objectification of Ixta, or participating in it.
Luis Jiménez is a Chicano artist who repeatedly works with the
theme of Ixta and Popo in his Southwest Pieta5 sculptures. In framing
Ixta and Popo as a Pietà, the religious icon of the Virgin Mary mourning with her son’s dead body in her arms, Jiménez makes central the
image of the warrior Popo holding the dead body of his lover. These
sculptures, then, focus on the pathos of the mourning Popo. In his
drawing Mexican Allegory on Wheels and watercolor Cholo with
Low-Rider Van, Jiménez depicts the legend of Ixta and Popo on a customized low-rider van driven by a contemporary Chicano/cholo. In
both of these works there is a connection between the Chicano driver
and the Aztec Popo, brought out by the colors in their clothing and
headgear. Ixta is bared to the waist, and her face is obscured by her
hair. With their almost exclusive emphasis on the male protagonist,
Jiménez’s works continue the objectification of Ixta.
On first reading, the excerpt above from Castillo’s poem
“Ixtacihuátl Died in Vain” appears to discuss Ixtacihuátl strictly as a
negative role. Both the title and the speaking subject of the poem create a critical distance from Ixta: the “We” refers to Chicanas, who feel
the heavy burden of this myth covering them and freezing them like
snow on the mountains. The poem contrasts the speaker with
Ixtacihuátl, and the speaker wants more from her life than to become
an icon, either sexualized or self-sacrificing. Yet, the poem also
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describes a more complex ambivalence, similar to the one Mercer
claims in his own readings of Mapplethorpe’s photographs of Black
men: “An ambivalent structure of feeling, in which anger and envy
divided the identifications that placed me somewhere always already
inside the text” (193).6
Like the Chicana narrator of “Ixtacihuátl Died in Vain,” the
woman in the photograph finds herself “always already inside the
text” of the Helguera calendar. Yet, Ixta Ponders Leverage Buyout
seems to me to constitute a rendering of Ixta and her myth that is
radically different from either Castillo or Jiménez, because it changes
Ixta’s position both within and outside of the frame of the photograph.
Popo—with whom the Mexican/Chicano male viewer is usually
expected to identify—does not even appear in the main space of the
photograph at all. He is not “replaced” by the White men in
the boardroom so much as he is displaced by the context of the
photograph. The subject of the photograph is Ixta. The photograph
renders Ixta, not in relation to Popo, but as a player in a contemporary
capitalist enclave. The calendar in the background creates a critical
distance for us, the viewers of the photograph, and this distance highlights “the imaginary projection of certain racial and sexual fantasies”
(Mercer 173). The men in the boardroom are not looking at Ixta: we
are. At the same time, she is meeting our gaze. The gaze of the Aztec
princess meets our fantasies head on, but does not submit to them.
What does Buitrón’s photograph have to say about the roles
available to contemporary Chicanas? The placement of the “La
Fortuna” calendar featuring Gesto Azteca next to the oil portraits
seems to highlight the Chicana’s newly arrived status in the boardroom: the formal portraits represent the legacy of the White men; the
calendar, unframed and hastily tacked up, suggests that up till now,
Ixta’s role has been that of the object, not the subject, of the gaze. The
other portraits are evenly spaced from one another. The Mexican calendar, however, is placed in the smallest space between the last portrait
and a corner of the room: it has been mounted in a space that was
never designed to hold it. The incongruity of the calendar raises questions about Ixta herself: does she belong in this boardroom? Was she
ever intended to have a place there? What is her role? Will she make
her fortune? Will she tell her fortune?
The other participants in the board meeting are looking toward the
head of the table; like Ixta, we presume, they ponder leverage buyout.
It is unclear, however, just who or what is being bought out. Has Ixta
at last become La Malinche, the vendida, the sellout, through her
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participation in the corporate world? Is she the one with the power,
buying out this otherwise White male corporation? Perhaps she is the
negotiating representative for a pan-Indian, intergalactic battle force.
Is she a positive role model? A negative one?
Another possibility is that the woman in the boardroom is a contemporary Chicana businesswoman, conventionally dressed, but that
someone is viewing her as the Aztec princess. This may be the fantasy
of the men in the room, or the fantasy of the woman herself. She may
be viewed by the White men as an exotic, and thus may embody to
them the Aztec princess. She may, like the driver of the low-rider van
in Jiménez’s work, imagine herself as an ancient Aztec. However,
unlike the cholo driver, if she is to imagine herself as a character in an
Helguera painting, she must change the terms of the painting. She cannot be both the subject and Ixtacihuátl. Thus she is not the sleeping
woman, looked at, but not looking, but rather the woman staring
boldly into the camera. By claiming the name or the fantasy of Ixta,
the woman changes what it means to be Ixta.
These questions remain unanswered and unanswerable by the
photograph, which plays upon the ambivalence of fantasies of Indian
women, but refuses narrative resolution. Through Buitrón’s deployment of the Mexican calendar of the Aztec Princess, Ixta Ponders
Leverage Buyout makes these fantasies visible, even as it deploys them
to undermine the Anglo male hegemony of the corporate boardroom.
While the boardroom may never be the same, neither will Ixta herself.
I titled this discussion “Aztec Princess Still At Large” because Buitrón’s
photograph seems to me to constitute an escape for Ixta. She has
stepped down from the “La Fortuna” calendar, changed from a
diaphanous robe into a suit, opened her eyes and faced her future headon. Perhaps she is realizing her own American dream. Perhaps her freedom is just another fantasy. Perhaps she has moved only from one
calendar to another, and will move into an infinite series of calendars/
fantasies. At any rate, it seems clear that her current role is one she has
chosen, and not the snow-capped destiny predetermined by myth.
Ixta Ponders Leverage Buyout is so provocative precisely because it
raises questions that it refuses to answer. At the same time, the woman
in the photograph challenges the viewer, forcing us to recognize that
she is not merely a frozen mythic figure, but her own agent. Again, like
the narrator of Burns’s poem, the direct look seems to clearly articulate
This ain’t no stoic look.
This is my face.
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Notes
1. Joanne Barker further explores representations of Native American women in
her essay on “Beyond Pocahontas,” also in this volume.
2. Hulme discusses the myth of Pocahontas as having “its own
interest. . . . Strictly speaking it is a product of the early nineteenth-century
search for a . . . national heritage” (141). “It is difficult to disentangle the confluence of the literary topos of the ‘enamoured princess’ from the historical
examples, of whom Pocahontas and Malinche are only the best known. Much
can be put down to male fantasy . . .” (300 n. 15). While Mexican nationalism
in the nineteenth century displaced the “cultural harmony through romance”
myth for La Malinche (replacing it with a narrative of feminine betrayal of the
Aztec people), in the case of Pocahontas the myth is still very much a part of
U.S. cultural identity.
3. Literally, “Indian Love,” Amor Indio is the title of one of Helguera’s paintings
of Ixta and Popo.
4. Because the Aztec themes of the calendars is well established, the imitation of
Helgueran themes by other Mexican calendar artists may be largely pragmatic:
Mexican calendar publisher Calendarios Landin holds the copyright to
Helguera’s work, and thus, to be competitive, other publishers must supply
Native themes by different artists.
5. These include Southwest Pieta, Popo and Isle, and Pieta del Suroeste.
6. While these examples suggest that Ixta is rendered in exclusively heterosexual
contexts, this is by no means the case. In Movements in Chicano Poetry, Rafael
Pérez-Torres argues that “Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain” “asserts a lesbian agency in
the face of patriarchy” (192). Joey Terrill’s painting La historia de amor is
based on Helguera’s Amor Indio in which Popo, seated, holds Ixta in his lap:
her eyes are closed, and it is unclear whether she is dead or merely sleeping.
Terrill’s La historia de amor replaces Ixta with an Aztec male youth, thus laying
claim to a history of gay Chicanos dating back to pre-Conquest times.
Elsewhere, I have argued that Terri de la Peña’s short story “La Maya”—about
a Chicana lesbian vacationing in the Yucatán, who has an affair with her
Mayan tour guide—can best be understood as participating in the same
racial/sexual economy as the Death of the Aztec Princess.
Bibliography
Alarcón, Norma. “Chicana Feminism: In the Tracks of ‘the’ Native Woman.”
Critical Studies 4(3) (1990): 248–256. Rpt. in Living Chicana Theory. Carla
Trujillo, ed. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1998, 371–382.
Burns, Diane. “Sure, You Can Ask Me a Personal Question.” Songs from this
Earth on Turtle’s Back. Ed. Joseph Bruchac. New York: Greensfield Review
Press, 1983, 40.
Castillo, Ana. “Ixtacihuatl Died in Vain.” In My Father Was a Toltec. New York:
Norton, 1995, 39–41.
206
Esquibel, Catrióna Rueda. “Velvet Malinche.” Velvet Barrios. Alicia Gaspar de
Alba, ed. New York: Palgrave, 2003.
Jiménez, Luis. Cholo with Lowrider Van. 1993. Watercolor on paper 43⬙ ⫻ 52⬙.
Man on Fire: Luis Jiménez. The Albuquerque Museum, Albuquerque: 1994,
Plate 46, 89.
———. Mexican Allegory on Wheels. 1976. Colored pencil on paper, Diptych,
28⬙ ⫻ 20⬙ each. Man on Fire: Luis Jiménez. The Albuquerque Museum,
Albuquerque: 1994, Plate 43, 87.
Mercer, Kobena. “Reading Racial Fetishism: The Photographs of Robert
Mapplethorpe.” (1986, 1989) Rpt. in Welcome to the Jungle: New Positions in
Black Cultural Studies. New York & London: Routledge, 1994, 171–219.
Pérez-Torres, Rafael. Movements in Chicano Poetry: Against Myths, Against
Margins. Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 88.
Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Terrill, Joey. La Historia De Amor. Calendar (almanaque). VIVA Lesbian and Gay
Latino Artists. Los Angeles, Plate, 1994.
Ybarra-Frausto, Tomás. “Grafica/Urban Iconography.” Chicano Expressions:
A New View in American Art. Inverna Lockpez, Tomás Ybarra-Frausto, Judith
Baca, and Kay Turner, eds. New York: INTAR Latin American Gallery, 1986,
21–27.
11
Embodied at the Shrine of
Cultural Disjuncture
Luz Calvo
And so it was not I who make a meaning for myself, but it is the meaning that was
already there, pre-existing, waiting for me.
—Fanon 134
She has this fear/that she’s an image/that comes and goes/clearing and darkening/the
fear that she’s the dreamwork inside someone else’s skull/ she has this fear.
—Anzaldúa 43
Exceeding is not escaping, and the subject exceeds precisely that to which it is bound.
—Butler 17
Laura Aguilar’s Three Eagles Flying (1990, silver gelatin print,
triptych, 24 ⫻ 60 inches) (figure 11.1) depicts the bound body as
(dis)juncture: between Mexico and the United States, between subordination and desire, between fantasy and geopolitical reality, between
artistic production and its reception. Reprinted in Coco Fusco’s
English is Broken Here, Deborah Bright’s The Passionate Camera, and
Carla Trujillo’s Living Chicana Theory, Aguilar’s image has achieved
notoriety, elegantly speaking to the intersection of nation, race, and
sexuality.1 My aim in this essay is to begin to unravel the significance
of Three Eagles Flying, an image I believe to be both brilliant and
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Luz Calvo
Figure 11.1 Laura Aguilar’s Three Eagles Flying (1990, silver gelatin print, triptych,
24 ⫻ 60 inches). Courtesy of the artist and Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects.
disturbing. It is an image that speaks the language of the
unconscious—presenting itself at once as dream, as fantasy scenario,
and as a series of desires and identifications that follow no politically
prescribed direction. It is also an image whose power constantly
evades my interpretive ability. Bound by the same flags as the subject
of the photo, I find myself constrained by my own resistences: after
years of studying this image, I continue to feel unable to “see” its
meaning or translate the strong emotional reaction I have to the image
into an analysis of its impact. This is an image that thwarts my desire
for mastery—an image that eludes, slips, exceeds interpretation. The
best I can do is to write a series of fragments that only just begin to
approach the image and my relation to it.
* * *
The Surface
In Three Eagles Flying, Aguilar photographs herself bound by a thick
cargo rope that wraps around her neck and across her chest, tying her
clenched fists in front of her body. Her head is wrapped tightly by the
Mexican flag whose central image—an eagle devouring a serpent sitting on a nopal—covers her face. Her hips are wrapped in the U.S.
flag, with stripes to the left and stars to the right. Aguilar’s breasts and
arms are bare; a tan line—perhaps from a tank top— reveals skin that
is lighter on the chest and darker on the arms, while a substantial scar
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is visible on the right forearm. Three Eagles Flying is a triptych: the
center photograph of Aguilar is flanked by photographs of an
American flag, on the left, and the Mexican flag, on the right. The
visual structure of the triptych is compact and symmetrical: the flags,
the body, and the rope are all carefully arranged.
I have just revealed that this image is of Aguilar herself, a fact that
would be evident to those familiar with her larger body of work, in
which self-portraiture is pivotal. In addition, Aguilar’s lesbian identity,
not immediately obvious in this image-context, is staged explicitly in
the “Latina Lesbian Series,” a photo-essay of the Los Angeles Latina
lesbian community in the 1980s, which includes a photo of Aguilar
herself. Of what use, if any, is this biographical information about the
artist? My aim is to read this photograph as a text: to find in it—rather
than in the artist—multiple, layered, and potentially contradictory significations. Yet, as I approach this image-text, I find it imbued with
meanings from other texts—including Aguilar’s oeuvre and the critical
analysis of her work—from which I can no longer isolate Three Eagles
Flying.2 I must, then, read Aguilar’s image intertextually: that is, in or
against other texts that speak to the image. In turn, this essay may
become part of the intertexual landscape through which Aguilar’s
image is read and understood. Thus, Aguilar’s Three Eagles Flying
cannot be kept “pure” as it is always already “contaminated” by other
texts—texts that imbue it with, among other things, “lesbianicity.”3
* * *
Beginnings
I don’t know where to begin my analysis: word or image? inside the
frame or outside? left or right? center? top or bottom? political or
psychic? dream? nightmare? or fantasy? If I were an eagle, I could
circle the image from far above in ever-tightening concentric circles. In
my fantasy, I would find a center, a core, an answer. In the analysis
that follows, I propose no center, no core, no answers.
* * *
No Translation
The Spanish word for eagle: águila. The artist plays on her last name in
the title, Three Eagles Flying. While other critics (Yarbro-Bejarano,
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Hulick) have noted the confluence of “águila” and “Aguilar,” I wonder
about the disjuncture: the additional “r” on the surname, the accent
mark over the “a” in águila. For me, the surname is almost, but not
quite, eagle—a difference overlooked by the title introducing three
eagles: the Mexican eagle, the American eagle, and the Chicana lesbian artist.4 The águila in Aguilar is further enforced by the image of
the eagle that literally replaces the artist’s face. (This is the Mexican
eagle, sitting on a nopal, devouring a serpent.) “Eagle” is defined by
the American Heritage Dictionary as “any of various large . . . birds of
prey . . ., characterized by a powerful hooked bill, keen vision, long
broad wings, and strong, soaring flight.” The artist presents herself
without the ability to “look back” at the spectator of this image, yet
because her entire head is covered by the Mexican flag, the image
suggests paradox: the subject cannot look back but she nevertheless is
endowed with “keen vision.”
* * *
“Don’t Stare”
In Male Subjectivity at the Margins, Kaja Silverman distinguishes
between the look and the gaze. Drawing on Lacan’s Four Fundamental
Concepts, Silverman notes that the gaze is exterior to the subject.
Indeed, Lacan likens the constitution of the subject to “the photo
session” and the “clicking of an imaginary camera” (Silverman, 128).
For Lacan “what determines [the subject] at the most profound level
in the visible is the gaze that is outside” (Silverman, 128). Silverman
explains that although the gaze might be said to be “the presence of
others as such, it is by no means coterminous with any individual
viewer or group of viewers. It issues ‘from all sides,’ whereas the eye
[sees] from only one point” (130). Thus, the look issues from the subject, while the gaze is focused on the subject. “The relationship
between [the look] and the gaze” proclaims Silverman, “is thus analogous in certain ways to that which links penis to phallus; the former
can stand in for the latter, but can never approximate it” (130).
As a spectator, I look at Aguilar’s image, much like a voyeur might
look through a keyhole. For hours, I sit alone at my desk, staring at
Aguilar’s image as I try to write. My eyes wander from the two flags to
the two breasts to the rope that binds them all together; my eyes circle
the parameters of the image but always return to the breasts. Then,
I avert my eyes. Look away. Stop myself from staring. It is “at
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precisely that moment when the eye is placed to the keyhole,”
Silverman explains, “that it is most likely to find itself subordinated to
the gaze” (130). So, as I look at the photograph, I become the subject
of the gaze. Perhaps someone will walk into the room and catch me
staring at the image. Lacan elucidates this (awkward) moment: as I
look through the peephole “a gaze surprises [me] in the function of
voyeur, disturbs [me], overwhelms [me], reduces [me]to shame”
(Lacan, 84, qtd in Silverman 130).
I am not sure what impels this shame. Certainly, one is “supposed”
to look at a photograph. Even if it is a nude. Even if it is an “artful”
S/M image. What is it in this image that provokes me so?
* * *
Fantasy
If as Jean Laplanche and J.P. Pontalis suggest, fantasy is “not the
object of desire, but its setting,” we might look at Aguilar’s photograph as staging a mise-en-scene in which the Chicana subject of the
photograph locates herself (fantasmatically) in a “sequence of
images.” Mise-en-scene is a cinematic term used to denote the setting—
including props, costumes, set design—of a film scene. The miseen-scene is critical; it sets the scene in time and space, and it marks
class and culture specificities. Mise-en-scene can be extended to the
setting of a fantasy; indeed, LaPlanche and Pontalis argue that fantasy
is mise-en-scene. The setting of Three Eagles Flying’s fantasy is, first of
all, between two flags. The flags are hanging (not flying). The mood
produced is sullen; the flags seem drained of color. Inserted between
the two hanging flags is Aguilar’s body bound by two more flags (or,
one imagines, the same flags, now binding her). A thick cargo rope ties
the flags to Aguilar’s body and puts her in bondage.
Three Eagles Flying is a “scene” in more that one sense: overtly, it
is a photographic scene staged for the camera, but it also suggests an
S/M “scene.” According to Thomas Murphy and Thomas Murrel, “In
a sadomasochistic encounter, [a scene is a] script of events or activities
previously negotiated or agreed upon and then followed by all participants” (119). The authors then quotes a personal interview with
“Lucinda” who provides ostensibly “inside” information: “[Scenes]
are usually worked out to right to the finest detail. I mean, they have
to be. There are a lot of crazies out there” (119). The detail of
Aguilar’s image—the position of the flags, the careful placement of the
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Luz Calvo
rope, the pose of the body—suggest a bondage scenario in which the
aim is to take one’s place in a highly charged visual image. There is an
overriding sense of exactness to this image: think of the time it took to
collect and arrange the props “just so.” If Three Eagles Flying stages a
fantasy, which I think it does, that fantasy is not in the subject of the
photograph offering herself as object of desire, but, rather in the fastidiously constructed setting: the rope, the flags, and the body all
meticulously placed in their position. Thus, I offer this definition of
“scene” from S/M culture simply because it underscores the fetishizing
processes that go into the production of a “scene.” I do not mean to
imply that S/M culture can be easily placed alongside Freud’s discussion of sadism and masochism; nor that S/M culture provides some
privileged ground from which to read Three Eagles Flying.
I do think that Aguilar’s image produces a fantasy scenario that recalls
Freud’s 1919 essay “A Child Is Being Beaten” with its critical insight that
each fantasy contains the multiple and concealed possibilities. Freud
finds that the subject of fantasy may oscillate between various
positions: feminine/masculine, active/passive, sadistic/masochistic and
scopophilic/exhibitionist. He demonstrates that fantasies undergo a
historical development in which they vacillate in relation to “the
author of the fantasy, and as regards their object, their content, and
their significance” (SE: 17: 184). In other words, the simple presentation of a fantasy such as “A child is being beaten” speaks to only one
configuration in a scenario that yields multiple permutations. How,
then, might Aguilar’s image—which presents us with a visualization of
the fantasy “A Chicana is in bondage”—be variously construed?
In the first instance, the image presents itself as a scene of subordination. In the words of one critic, Three Eagles Flying “confronts
competing poles of her own cultural identity—the American and
Mexican ones. Never totally accepted by either she is inextricably
bound to both . . .” (Marcellino 19). In this view, Three Eagles Flying
illustrates the “conditions of subordination” of a Chicana subject,
who lives under two symbolic orders—that of the United States on one
hand and Mexico on the other—that act upon her, weigh her down,
anchor her to a reality not of her choosing. Aguilar’s scene speaks to a
geopolitical drama that leaves its mark on the bodies that inhabit the
greater Mexico–U.S. borderlands. However, if the analysis is left here,
then the Chicana is imagined to have no desire except to escape, an
impossible desire. I believe, however, that this image provides the possibility for alternate scenarios. The image exceeds, which is not to say
that it escapes, its geopolitical grounding.
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Contained within the fantasy scenario staged by the image is a
second spectatorial fantasy: “I am in bondage.” While the first
“fantasy” was political in nature, the second is clearly sexual. Here,
a sadomasochistic economy of desire emerges from the previously
“political” scene as the spectator identifies with the bound subject: the
spectator imagines herself to be the woman bound. Thus, the original
“she is in bondage” is replaced by “I am in bondage.” Thus, “I” imagine myself bound and blindfolded; entirely helpless—at the will of my
captors. In order to flesh out this fantasy I create—consciously or
not—an imaginary captor. I realize as I am writing that I have always
imagined the subject in this photograph (and me in my identification
with her) to be at the will of a group of women. In my fantasy she/I are
captured by a group of Chicana lesbians! Lest the reader think I am
out of my mind, I might refer to the authority of Freud and especially
his analysis of the girlhood fantasy “A child is being beaten.”5 Freud
finds that concealed in the fantasy “A child is being beaten” is the
fantasy “I am being beaten”; and in yet another turn, he finds that
the producer of the fantasy often constructs an “artistic superstructure”6 that involves elaborate rituals and a series of “whipping
boys” who are beaten. In this context, then, my fantasy, does not seem
at all unusual; in fact, it seems rather in line with those discussed
by Freud.
I believe that my fantasy—being put in bondage by a wild gang of
Chicana lesbians—is further provoked by the implicit photographic
relation: I am put in the position of spectator of this scene by the
Chicana lesbian artist. I am already under her spell, if you will.
(However, I am not sure when or how the singular artist acquired
a gang.)
At any rate, it should be clear to the reader that I am offering my
spectatorial fantasy, in the hope that others might be spurred to locate
themselves in the scenario. I do understand, however, as Teresa de
Lauretis has astutely noted in regard to film: “it does not always follow that every film or every film’s fantasy is capable of engaging every
spectator . . . spectatorial admission into the film’s scenario of desire is
complex, overdetermined, and not always possible” (98). The same
would be true of entry into the “scenario of desire” staged by Three
Eagles Flying; indeed, all I can do is to attempt to unravel my own
identifications and desires in relation to the image.
Thus, I would like to return for a moment to elaborate on the initial, political, fantasy “A Chicana is in bondage” that now can be seen
to conceal a similar, but sexual, fantasy: “A Chicana is put in bondage
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Luz Calvo
by a gang of Chicana lesbians and I am watching.” Here, the spectator revels in her position as voyeur; this is the position of Mercedes
McCambridge in Touch of Evil, when she declares, “Lemme stay,
I want to watch.”
* * *
Ambivalence
Far from staging a straightforward critique of racial and sexual
oppression in the Mexico–U.S. borderlands, Three Eagles Flying produces a thoroughly ambivalent position for both the spectator of the
image and for the Chicana lesbian subject of photograph. In his essay
“Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia,” Kobena Mercer identifies
the “fear/fantasy formulation” as the expression of social and psychic
ambivalence. Excessive, irrational fear might signal a sexual fantasy
that cannot be acknowledged by the subject, who projects instead fear
and repulsion. (This is the terrain of Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White
Masks: the psychosexual underpinnings of racism.) The psychoanalytic
conception of ambivalence is crucial to the fear/fantasy formulation
deployed by Mercer. Defined by J. Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis as “the
simultaneous existence of contradictory tendencies, attitudes or feelings
in the relationship to a single object,” ambivalence, I argue, structures
U.S. discourses about Mexico as well as Mexican and Chicano/a
responses to U.S. hegemony.
Playing in the field of this ambivalence, Aguilar’s image presents
three possible identificatory positions to the spectator: the position of
watching the scene, the position of being bound, and the position of
restraining and tying up the Chicana subject. (I have commented on
the first two of these, I leave it to the reader to find my [their] sadistic
desires embedded in this image/analysis.) To think literally for a
moment, we might consider how in staging her own bondage in this
photo(graphic) scene, Aguilar occupies both active and passive
positions—she ties up a woman in the staging of this fantasy and she
is tied up—she looks at the photograph as the photographer and
she is looked at as the photographed subject. The scene of Three
Eagles Flying is completely structured by what Kobena Mercer
identifies (in another context) as an oscillation between the position
of subject, object, and spectator. Discussing the relation between
ambivalence and this oscillation, Mercer writes, “the ambivalence of
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identification can be seen to arise from the effect of unconscious
phantasy in which the self oscillates between positions of subject,
object or spectator of the scene” (40). What I have tried to bring to
surface are the unconscious fantasies provoked in me by Three Eagles
Flying. My resistances, repressions, and internal censors—not to
mention the bounds of common decency—preclude any further
disclosure.
* * *
The Subject
I begin reading Judith Butler’s The Psychic Life of Power and I find her
introductory chapter seems to speak to the scenario portrayed in
Three Eagles Flying. Butler asserts a paradox at the heart of subjectificaton: that it is necessary “to desire the conditions of one’s own
subordination” (9). Like Aguilar’s image, Butler’s assertion disturbs: it
gets under my skin. Productively, Butler challenges a liberal–humanist
formulation of the individual “whose agency is always and only
opposed to power.” We might back up for a moment to consider the
distinction between “subject,” used by Butler and others working
within psychoanalytic or post-structuralist paradigms, and “person”
or “individual” used in liberal and humanist discourses. “Subject” is
distinguished from “person” and “individual” because the latter two
imply a kind of free agency—someone who can act autonomously
or is self-ruling. Butler’s opening epigraph is the Oxford English
Dictionary’s definition of subjection: “The act or fact of being
subjected, as under a monarch or other sovereign or superior power;
the state of being subject to, or under the dominion of another;
hence gen. subordination . . . The condition of being subject . . .”
Thus, unlike the individual who is imagined to exist apart from or
opposing power, the “subject” is understood to be always already
subjugated.
Aguilar’s Three Eagles Flying, then, is seen to stage a subject (not an
individual) who exists—or more accurately, comes into being—inside
of complex matrices of power: apparatus of state power, as well as the
fields of sexual, racial, and national difference. This image might be
the nativity scene of “the” Chicana subject. It is not a scene that can
be undone, however, without the very dissolution of the Chicana subject. In other words, there is no (Chicana) subject, without the
216
Luz Calvo
moment of becoming subjugated to the (state, national, patriarchal,
Oedipal, familial, etc.) powers that constitutes one as subject.
* * *
Aesthetics of Pessimism
Speaking to psychic processes as well as political ones, Aguilar’s
photography marks a decisive shift away from the emphasis on “positive” images that were prominent in earlier eras of self-representation.7
The numerous photographs, murals, and silkscreens of Chicanas with
fists raised in defiance—the popular iconography of the brown power
movement—are undone by Aguilar’s image: her fists are not only not
raised they are tied in front of her. Aguilar belongs to a generation of
postcolonial artists who explore what Mercer describes as “the fluid,
mobile and highly unpredictable arena of fear and fantasy.”
* * *
This collection of fragments continues to swerve around what only
seem to be disjunctive categories: from politics to fantasy, desire to subordination, artistic production to its reception, Mexico to the United
States. How is it possible to write while keeping present the mutual
imbrication of these categories over and against discourses that need to
keep them separate and divided? How also to recognize the moments
of disjuncture—when the categories disintegrate and only bodies
remain? My reading opens but deliberately leaves unclosed the nature
of the relationship of the psychic to the political: I suggest that neither
is primary and that both exist in tension with the other.
Notes
1. In addition to its circulation in these books, Aguilar’s image has also been
reprinted in the following journals: Latin American Art 5(3), High
Performance, Artweek (October 18, 1990), Commoción.
2. Several critics have written about Aguilar’s work; the most definitive article to
date is Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano’s “Laying it Bare: The Queer/Colored Body” in
Photography by Laura Aguilar. See also Hulick, Alfaro, Salzman.
3. I am drawing from Barthes reading of “Italianicity” in Rhetoric of the Image
33–34.
217
4. These three designations are “figures,” i.e., signifiers imbued with a complex
set of cultural connotations. Not a question of “essential” differences, the
adjectives “Mexican,” “American,” and “Chicana lesbian” modify nouns,
“eagle” and “artist” in ways that change the cultural connotations. See Gloria
Anzaldúa’s discussion of the connotations of “Chicana lesbian writer” as
opposed to “writer” in her artile “To(o) Queer the Writer.”
5. Of course, for some readers it is my appeal to the patriarchal authority of Freud
that might signify that I have “lost my mind.”
6. In the edition edited by Rieff, Phillip ed. (118) the term is rendered “Artistic
superstructure”; in the Standard Edition “elaborate superstructure” (190).
7. Silverman notes that the call for “positive images of women, blacks, gays, and
other(s) . . . all too often work to resubstantialize identity, even at times to
essentialize it” (154).
References
Alfaro, Luis. “Queer Culture: ‘Exposing Ourselves’: Photography Expression
Workshops by Laura Aguilar.” Vanguard (August 7, 1992): 17.
Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. San Francisco, CA:
Aunt Lute Books, 1987.
———. “To(o) Queer the Writer—Loca, escritora y chicana.” Living Chicana
Theory. Carla Trujillo, ed. Berkeley, CA: Third Woman Press, 1998, 263–276.
Series in Chicana/Latina Studies.
Barthes, Roland. “The Rhetoric of the Image” in Image, Music, Text, Stephen
Heath, trans. New York: Noonday Press, 1977.
Bhabha, Homi K. “The Other Question: The Stereotype and Colonial Discourse.”
The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality. London: Routledge, 1992,
312–331.
Bulter, Judith. The Psychic Life of Power: Theories of subjection. Palo Alto:
Stanford University press, 1997.
Burgin, Victor, James Donald, and Cora Kaplan, eds. Formations of Fantasy.
London: Methuen, 1986.
de Lauretis, Teresa. The Practice of Love: Lesbian Sexuality and Perverse Desire.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks, Charles Lam Markmann, trans.
New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1967.
Farr, Ragnar, ed. Mirage: Enigmas of Race, Difference and Desire. London:
Institute of Contemporary Arts, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995.
Freud, Sigmund. “A Child Is Being Beaten.” in Sexuality and the Psychology of
Love, Philip Reiff, ed. Alix and James Strachey, trans. New York: Collier, 1963,
107–133.
———. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of
Sigmund Freud, James Strachey, trans. and ed. London: Hogarth Press,
1953–1974. 24 vols.
Hulick, Diana Emery. “Laura Aguilar.” Latin American Art. 5(3), 1993:
52–54.
218
Luz Calvo
Laplanche, Jean and Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. “Fantasy and the Origins of
Sexuality.” Formations of Fantasy. Victor Burgin, James Donald, and Cora
Kaplan, eds. London: Methuen, 1986, 5–28.
———. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. New York: Norton, 1973.
Marcellino, Michael C. “First Word.” Latin American Art. 5(3), 1993: 19.
Mercer, Kobena. “Busy in the Ruins of Wretched Phantasia.” Mirage: Enigmas of
Race, Difference and Desire. Ragnar Farr, ed. London: Institute of
Contemporary Arts, Institute of International Visual Arts, 1995, 15–55.
Murphy, Thomas and Thomas Murrell. The Language of Sadomasochism.
New York: Greenwood, 1989.
Salzman, Linda Sher. “The Honest Eye: Image and Identity at Loyola Marymount
University.” Artweek, October 18, 1990: 15.
Silverman, Kaja. Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge, 1992.
12
“¿Soy Punkera,Y Que?”: Sexuality,Translocality,
and Punk in Los Angeles and Beyond
My theory had precedence. Stay with me on this.The Clash, for instance jazzed up their
music with this reggae influence—a direct reflection of their exposure to the Caribbean
diaspora and its musical expression there in London. Nothing new—the usual white
man appropriation of an exotic other story—anyway, the Sex Pistols, my theory went,
were going to do the same with Norteno, el Tex Mex. I was going on the assumption
that the Pistols probably heard the conjunto on KCOR or Radio Jalapeno on the bus
ride down from Austin. But the point is, it worked.Talk about your revisionist histories!
Griel Marcus is gonna flip!
––Molly Vasquez from Jim Mendiola’s 1996 film, Pretty Vacant.
When Alice, lead singer for the Bags rock group, takes the stage in torn fishnet hose
and micro-mini leopard-skin tunic, she explodes into convulsive, unintelligible vocals.The
effect is a raw sexuality not for the fainthearted.
––Los Angeles Times, 1978.
The xeroxed flyer advertising Pretty Vacant, Jim Mendiola’s 1996
independent short film (figure 12.1), depicts the much loved figure of
the Mexican La Virgen de Guadalupe strutting, of all things, an upside
down electric guitar a la Jimi Hendrix.1 As a U.S. born Chicana who, in
the 1980s, was rescued from the suburbs of Los Angeles by the
Ramones, X, and Dead Kennedys, I must admit that I was captivated by
this image and intrigued by the film’s title, an obvious reference to the
220
Figure 12.1 Flyer insert for Pretty Vacant (dir. Jim Mendiola, 1996).
British Sex Pistols. A guitar jets out from La Guadalupe at a right angle,
transforming the familiar oval shape of La Virgen’s image into the shape
of cross, or an intersection of sorts.2 What was this flyer suggesting by
juxtaposing these deeply symbolic, yet seemingly unrelated, cultural
icons? How did the title relate? And why did this deliciously irreverent
image prompt me to think of the critically acclaimed photonovela/comic
“¿Soy Punkera,Y Que?”
221
series Love and Rockets by Los Bros. Hernandez? And the title? Pretty
Vacant is one of the “hit” songs of the infamous 1970s British punk
band, the Sex Pistols. Again, what is this flyer suggesting? With all due
respect, what and who lies at the intersection of Guadalupe and punk?
It turns out that main protagonist of Pretty Vacant, Molly Vasquez,
like the fierce Latina characters of the Hernandez Brothers’Love and
Rockets photo-novela series, and most importantly, real life Angelino
Chicana punk musicians,3 live at that particular intersection. The
film depicts a week in the culturally hybrid “do-it-yourself” world of
“La Molly” Vasquez, the off-beat 20-something, English-speaking
Chicana feminist, artista, bisexual, punkera subject who lives in a
working-class area of San Antonio, Tejas. Her love of the Sex Pistols
leads her to the discovery of a well-kept secret that will allow her, as a
producer of ’zines and a beginning filmmaker, to rewrite rock ‘n’ roll
history by inserting herself and Tejano culture into its narrative. All
this, while she prepares for a gig in her all girl band, “Aztlan-a go-go.”
My mention of Pretty Vacant serves as point of departure for my
discussion of the emergence, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, of
a punk “do-it-yourself” Chicana grassroots feminist cultural production that circulated coterminus with other burgeoning Chicana activist
and scholarly endeavors, as well as the East Los Angeles/Hollywood
punk scenes, but have yet to be examined in-depth. The film succeeds
at what scholars of U.S. popular music have attempted—it shifts the
paradigm that frames the reigning narrative of popular music produced in the United States.4 Disrupting the status quo narrative of
popular music production (in this specific case U.S. punk) by granting
a young Latina (more specifically a Tejana) the authority to chronicle
the history of punk, the film compels scholars to acknowledge the
complexity of popular music and popular music studies in the United
States. Ultimately, the film viscerally unsettles long-held assumptions
that unconsciously erase the influence of U.S. Latinos from popular
music’s sonic equation (and asks what is at stake in reproducing that
erasure). It opens a discursive space for my own analysis of the production of punk music by Chicanas in East Los Angeles and
Hollywood during the 1970s and 1980s, and the music’s relation to
punk communities beyond the United States.
Beyond the Frame
The lens, her hands, her eye/body, the door, the house, the yard. She
moves toward us, the viewers. The arrangement of elements within
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Figure 12.2 Still photo for Pretty Vacant (dir. Jim Mendiola, 1996).
this frame evoke a sensation of both depth and movement. The lens of
her Super 8 camera is at the front and center of the image. Behind the
camera is a close-up of her face, her furrowed brow focusing. From
there, her hands, eye/body, door, and house recede from her camera
lens until the frame is filled by the house, except for an open space to
the right where the yard begins. The composition implies a doublemovement: we are pulled toward her center as she simultaneously
moves away from the door. She is both the object and the subject of
the gaze. She stands unconfined, outside of the black weathered door
of the paint-chipped house behind her, outside of the private domestic
sphere. She has moved out into the day light, into the public sphere.
The black and white image described below (figure 12.2), circulates
as a press photo for Pretty Vacant.5 The photo functions as a visual
allegory for the way Chicana feminists and artists—as women of
color—at the turn of the century, have turned a critical eye on the public
sphere, and in doing so, have envisioned new subjects and subjectivities,
as well as mapped out affiliations with racialized-as-non-white women
within and across national borders. Who is this young woman at the
223
center of the frame?6 In part, she is a fictionalized construct inspired
by the impact made by young feminist punks from East L.A.
Las Punkeras
What is fascinating about the film Pretty Vacant is the overlapping of
the fictional character’s art-practices with the under-analyzed artistic
production of Chicana musicians and visual artists shaping the Los
Angeles punk sensibility. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Chicanas
in local bands like the Brat (led by Teresa Covarrubias), and The Alice
Bags band (led by Alicia Armedariz Velasquez) reconstructed the
sound and subjects of British punk. After providing a brief context for
the emergence of Chicana/o punk, I examine excerpts of oral histories
that allow these Chicana punkeras to narrate their artistic conditions
of production, gender relations, as well as the punk aesthetic that
emerged in the late 1970s and 1980s.7
Chicana/o punk, like punk everywhere, embodied a sonic response
to the “excesses of seventies rock.”8 Rock chroniclers Reyes and
Waldman note that, “Indulgent guitar solos, pretentious lyrics, and
pompous lead singers went against everything that Chicano rock’n’roll
represented from Ritchie Valens forward.”9 The appeal of punk to
rebellious Chicana and Chicano youth makes sense for several reasons:
(1) the D.I.Y. (Do It Yourself) sensibility at the core of punk musical subcultures found resonance with the practice of rasquache, a Chicana/o
cultural practice of “making-do” with limited resources.10 In fact,
Chicana/o youth had historically been at the forefront of formulating
stylized social statements via fashion and youth subculture—beginning
with the Pachuchos, and on to Chicana Mods; and (2) punk’s critique
of the status quo, of poverty, of sexuality, of class inequality, of war,
spoke directly to working-class East Los Angeles youth.11
Yet for all its familiar feel, punk’s international sensibility also
appealed to Chicanas/os despite, or perhaps because of the city’s history
of physically and economically segregating Chicanos apart from the
wealthy West Side, thought to be by Los Angeles’s dominant culture
the place of important “worldly” cultural invention.12 It goes without
saying that Chicana/o punk did not exist in isolation. Reyes and
Waldman observe that
Chicano punk groups where much more deep embedded in the
Hollywood rock scene than were the 1960s bands from East Los Angeles.
On any given weekend in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Los Illegals,
224
the Brat, and the Plugs would be playing somewhere in Hollywood.
Before they crossed the LA River, however, they played at the Vex; an
East LA club devoted to presenting punk rock bands.13
Vex emerged as an attempt by Chicano youth in East Los Angeles,
“to eliminate the barriers that inhibited Chicanos from playing in
other parts of L.A., and that kept outsiders from coming from the
neighborhood.” Willie Herron of Los Illegal remembers,” We wanted
to bring people from the West Side to see groups from the East
Side.’ ”14 At an historical moment when the confluence of cultures
began to accelerate in the wake of global demographic shifts these
Chicana/o youth transformed punk into a social site where popular
music, national identity, sexuality, and gender dynamics were transformed. Band’s like East L.A.’s Thee Undertakers used a “global”
form of youth subculture to bring together local, if segregated, youth.
She Says
Punk allowed people to just get up there, and even if you were not feeling confident—
which was not a problem I ever had—but I think for women who felt like they weren’t
sure of themselves, it was very easy to get up and do it anyway, because you weren’t
being judged on how well you played.
––Alicia Armendariz Velasquez, singer-songwriter, 1998, Los Angeles.15
Working-class Chicanas such as Alicia Armedariz Velasquez, Theresa
Covarrubias, Angela Vogel, and others shaped independent, noncommercial music communities and subcultures in Los Angeles and
responded to the shrinking of the public sphere and the increased privatization of daily life in contemporary U.S. culture through their
musical practices. Although these women impacted local independent
music communities sounds and concerns, almost no formal documentation of their participation exist. The fact the women disrupt categories of identity (such as singer-song writer, Chicana, woman
musician, punk, etc.) mitigates against recognition of their influence in
discussions of subcultural musical practices and in discussions focused
on countering the shrinking of the public sphere.
I am interested in the ways these women appropriated, reshaped,
and critiqued imagery from unexpected sources such as British youth
musical subculture to invent local cultural practices that allowed them
to express their realities in a public context. I argue that Chicanas as
225
producers transformed punk and new wave aesthetics into sites of
possibility for transnational conversations concerning violence against
women and the effects of the shrinking public sphere. Given that most
youth musical practices and communities are understood as maledominated arenas, and rarely as Latino social spaces, these subcultures
may seem an unlikely space for the development of a transnational
conversation. Yet, it was a site of possibility for these young Chicanas
who engaged these subcultures.
Las Gritonas/ The Screamers
The Los Angeles bands I’m interested in produced their music on
independent labels, which circulated in grassroots and alternative
distribution circuits. However these bands had little access to major
distribution networks for at least two reasons: most major record
labels at the time could not imagine the market appeal of Chicano
alternative music, and (much less Latino rock inflected by a grass roots
feminist ideology and punk aesthetic); and the women’s stated primary
desire was not to “make it within the mainstream” music industry, but
to create a place for public self-expression.
This context, in addition to larger social prejudices against “women
in rock,” helps to explain why the innovative use by young Chicanas
of alternative music to circulate critiques of social inequality and to
express their rage against the domestic machine has often gone unrecognized: their recordings and visual images are extremely difficult to
locate. This lack of distribution and exposure also occurred with other
artists of the period, such as spoken word artist Marisela Norte, who
also articulated a grassroots critique of social inequality that circulated in and outside of the university setting.16 The cultural production
of these young Chicanas paralleled the efforts of Chicana feminist theories of representation at the same time, even though their efforts
rarely, if ever, intersected. As scholars of Chicana feminism wrote
about multiply inflected subjectivity, the intersection of race, class,
and gender, and the production of new Chicana subjects, these young
women expressed these experiences in their music.17
These working-class Chicanas who helped create the local sound of
the Los Angeles underground punk subculture were attracted to it for
various reasons, but all of them experienced or witnessed violence
against Chicanas at an early age and most had been violently sexualized. In a series of interviews I conducted with Alicia Armedariz
Vasquez and Teresa Covarrubias, they asserted that the visual and
226
sonic language of punk subculture allowed them to express their private rage about restrictions place on and the violence done to their
bodies and their mother’s bodies. In addition, their narratives document the effects of the shrinking of public sphere by forces of economic privatization that plagued the 1980s and continue to this day.
In other words, theirs is a story of transnationalism told from the bottom up in the years leading up to accords like NAFTA from the point
of view of working-class women. Though each woman’s experience
was different, each was attracted to punk subculture because it was a
place where they reimagined the world they lived in, it was a place
where they saw themselves as empowered subjects.
Despite the negative press the punk scene received (as extremely
violent and racist) all of the women experienced the punk scene as a
liberating space where the lines between gender and race were easily
if temporarily blurred. It was a place where class differences and
racial divisions where held temporarily in suspension. In fact, all the
interviewees attested to the fact that in Los Angeles, the scene was
multicultural—it reflected the mix of Los Angeles population. In an
era when representation of Latinas was even more rare than today on
English-language television and radio, the do-it-yourself attitude and
aesthetic appealed to them.
In the Bag
Alicia Armedariz Velasquez, stage name Alice Bag, of the Bags Band,
is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Growing up in East Los
Angeles, she came of age in the early 1980s. She, like Teresa
Covarrubias, described her engagement with punk as a way out of an
environment she found too judgmental in terms of ethnicity and sexuality. She found no recourse in the mythic traditional Mexican family
to discuss the domestic violence she witnessed as a child. Her embrace
of punk culture occurred in “a period when Chicanas were questioning their traditional roles, increasing their participation within the
political arena, and inscribing a budding Chicana feminist discourse
and practice.”18 Although Amendariz Velasquez’s path diverged
from most Chicanas of the day, so profound was her influence on the
L.A. punk scene, she was a featured artist in the recent photo exhibition and catalog called Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk. In fact,
punk music chronicler David Jones calls Amendariz Velasquez the
inventor of the west coast hard-core punk sound.19
227
In 1978, Amendariz Velasquez was featured in a Los Angles Times
article, “Female Rockers—A New Breed.”20 Amendariz Velasquez,
then known as “Alice Bag,” along with Diane Chai of the Alleycats
and Xene of X, were considered the most groundbreaking women of
the punk scene because their performances demolished narrow models
of “women in rock”: “the wronged blue belter a la Janis Joplin or the
coy sex kitten typified by Linda Ronstadt. In tune with new wave’s
spirit of change, women punkers are rejecting the confining steoreotype and demanding more.”21 Although no explicit mention of Alice’s
ethnicity was made, McKenna describes her with code words reserved
for ethnic others: “Alice, an exotic beauty whose frenzied vocal
seizures generate such chaos that the Bags has earned a reputation for
closing clubs.”22 In retrospect we note that McKenna, perhaps
unknowingly, cites two Chicanas, Ronstadt and Armendariz Velasquez,
as wildly divergent models of “women in rock.”
Often accused of being too aggressive on stage, Amendariz
Velasquez would perform in pink mini-dresses and severe makeup. In
a clip from Penelope Spheeris’s 1981 documentary film, The Decline
of Western Civilization, we witness Amendariz Velasquez exploding
onstage and wrestling the boys who jump on stage during the show.
The pink of Armendariz Velasquez’s dress clashed with her performance
and produced a complex statement about women’s realities. Amendariz
Velasquez did not reject femininity per se, but rejected the equation of
femininity with victimization and passivity. In fact, McKenna states,
“women punkers like Alice Bag and Xene project an oddly incongruous sexuality. While not exactly neuter, their shock-level redefinition
of the female role will take a while to be assimilated culturally.”23 Yet,
Amendariz Velasquez’s assertion that “Female performers have always
tended to be more reserved but all that is changing . . .” foresaw and
provided models for performers like Courtney Love, often noted, if
not entirely correctly, for what has been called her unprecedented feminine rock aesthetic.24
Amendariz Velasquez also described the appeal of punk to young
women in practical terms. She explains, “Punk allowed people to just
get up there, and even if you were not feeling confident—which was
not a problem I ever had—but I think for women who felt like they
weren’t sure of themselves, it was very easy to get up and do it anyway,
because you weren’t being judged on how well you played.”25 One of
the best preserved and accessible document of Amendariz Velasquez’s
fearless performance as Alice Bag is the Bags band recording, “We
Don’t Need the English.”26 With characteristic sardonic humor, Alice
228
and the band loudly refuses the notion that the only authentic punk
scene was found in Great Britian.
We don’t need the English
Tell us what we should be
We don’t need the English
With their boring songs of anarchy
Telling us what to wear
Telling us to dye our hair
All they do is dye their hair
Fuck them, send them
into East Berlin
(Chorus)
Telling us how to play
Telling us what to say
Saying our scenes are fake
Their brains are all half-baked. . . .
The song opens by rejecting “the English, with their boring songs of
anarchy,” a direct reference to “Anarchy in the U.K.” by uber-punk
band, the Sex-Pistols. The song concludes by metaphorically banning
the English from the “Canterbury”, an infamous, rundown apartment
complex in Hollywood that served as a breeding ground for Hollywood
punks.27 Though Amendariz Velasquez did not write the song, the lyrics
hold a different valiance when we consider that Amendariz Velasquez
was bilingual in a city that often denigrated Spanish-speaking ethnic
minorities and that she has taught Bilingual Education for many years in
the Los Angeles Unified Public School District.
Although Amendariz Velasquez emerged as a performer in the
1970s Hollywood punk scene (unlike Covarrubias, who grew out of
the East Los Angeles punk scene), Amendariz Velasquez came to
Chicana consciousness in the early 1990s. After performing as a
Lovely Elvette for El Vez and the Memphis Mariachis, Cholita and
other L.A. based bands, she formed a folk group, Las Tres, with Teresa
Covarrubias and Angela Vogel, former member of the East Los band,
the Odd Sqad.28 When Vogel left the band, the two remaining members formed the duo Goddess 13.
East Los Angeles’s The Brat
What attracted Teresa Covarrubias, who was born to a workingclass Mexican American family, to punk musical subculture was its
229
do-it-yourself attitude, what she calls the “non-pretentiousness of it.”
Covarrubias discovered punk in the mid-1970s when her older sister,
went on a backpack trip through Europe and began sending her punk
fanzines from Germany and England. She recalls that
What really attracted me to punk, was the notion that “Gee, I could do
that. ‘Zines had all these paste-up things and all these crazy little articles, and these girl bands and guy bands, and it just seemed like so open.
It didn’t seem like . . . you had to play really well. It seemed like a from
your gut” type thing, and I just fell right into it. You know, it was really
raw, and it was in your face, and I really liked that, it kind of got me
goin.”29
Inspired by this low-tech sensibility, one that she says “emerged”
from the gut and seemed open to young men and women, she decided
to form a new wave band with Rudy Medina, called The Brat. The
Brat is synonymous with East L.A. Punk. In contrast to Amendariz
Velasquez’s family who was fully supportive of her musical lifestyle,
Covarrubias’s family discouraged her. Although she found a place in
the band to critique gender norms with song titles like “Misogyny,”
she found that sexism did exist in the scene, especially with her own
band mates. At times they dismissed her creative opinions because she
did not play an instrument. During those times, she explains that
Because I couldn’t get what I wanted, I started acting out in really selfdestructive ways . . . because I just felt like I had no say . . . even now,
women don’t have a lot of faith in themselves, especially if you are going
outside of the norm, when you’re treading new ground. Everybody’s
always telling you what you can’t do. . . . people look at you and you’re
brown and you’re a woman, and they think, “she can’t do that.” It’s like
they immediately assume less.30
Fortunately, visual documentation exists of Covarrubias’s performances of her song, “Misogyny.” In 1992, the television program Vista
L.A. dedicated an entire segment, “Chicanas In Tune” to Covarrubias
and Armendariz Velasquez. “Misogyny” was originally written while
Covarrubias was in the Brat. The Vista L.A. clip captures
Covarrubias’s 1980 punk/new wave mode and documents her performance as she swings to the beat in a shimmering early 1960s style
dress. Her voice is forced to compete with the guitar, but she holds the
attention of her enthusiastic audience. The lyrics critique the position
of women within patriarchal culture.
230
A woman is a precious thing
Far beyond a wedding ring
You have kept her under your thumb
You don’t love her
You abuse her,
You confuse her
You just use her
A woman’s mind is a priceless Gift
Talk to her like it is
Women’s beauty is in her mind
All you see is the sexual side
You don’t love her
You abuse her,
You confuse her
You just use her
Blatant is misogyny
It’s captured in our history
You will find it hard to steal
The strength from within a woman’s will
The narrator breaks down the elements of misogyny by exposing
how they are practiced in everyday life in the following way, “you
don’t love her, you abuse her, you confuse her, you just use her.” The
narrator critiques the strictures of matrimony that reduce women to
property, to be possessed much like a wedding ring. Again, the narrator exhorts the listener to understand that a woman’s strength lies in
her mind and will and that it is waste to value women only for their
sexuality. Moreover, the power of the narrator’s critique lies in her
acknowledgment of the blatancy and frequency of women’s abuse.
Violence against women is so prevalent and in the open that its practices can be tracked throughout history and across geography, though
its effects often go unacknowledged.
Though the Brat released a successful E.P called The Brat, they
eventually broke up and morphed into Act of Faith, released a compact disk and then broke up again, Covarrubias has continued to write
and perform on top of her duties as elementary teacher in the Los
Angeles Unified School District.
Mex Goddesses
Alicia Armendariz Velasquez was part of a group of young
songstresses that in the 1970s “blanch[ed] at being described as
women’s libbers—a tame, middle-aged scene by their standards
231
[but]. . . . could accurately be described as nihilistic feminists.”31
Meanwhile, at Hollywood punk shows in the 1980s, Covarrubias
encountered a “a punk elite,” that was “really particular about what
you looked like. If you didn’t look right, they could be rude. There
were a couple of times that they would tell me, ‘you don’t belong
here.’ ”32 In the early 1990s, however, first as Las Tres with Angela
Vogel, and later Goddess 13, the two forged a sound that disrupted the
exclusivity of White feminism and anti-Mexican punk. This sound,
Armendariz Velasquez declares, “speaks to women of color about
their experiences as women.”33 “Happy Accident” by Armendariz
Velasquez typifies the ways the group highlighted violence against
women in their performance. The song’s narrative centers around a
battered woman’s response to her partner’s violent abuse.
Please believe me / I didn’t mean it /
All I saw / was the look in his eye /
and I feared for my life / once again.
I didn’t know / it was coming /
all I know / is the done if before /
sent me crashing to the floor / but no more. . . .
Oh and / I can’t say that /
Oh no, no / I regret it /
‘cause after all it be him or me /
you’d be talking to.
And if I had the chance / to do it all again /
I don’t think it / would have a different end
/ I’m quite happy with this accident.
I didn’t know / it was loaded /
Yes, I knew where he kept all his guns /
and I just grabbed the one / that was closest.
So, if you ask / why I’m smiling /
You may think / that a prison cell’s tough /
but I’m much better off / than before.
Though the narrative is bleak, the mid-tempo beat creates a
“Chicana trova sound.”34 The contrast between the sound of the
music and the lyrics creates a punk-like disruption. The limited
options the woman possesses in response to the domestic violence that
has “sent [her] crashing to the floor” end up freeing her from one situation, but contain her in another. She finds that a “prison cell’s tough /
but I’m much better off than before.” This tragic all too real scenario
speaks to the alarming rate of women of color’s incarceration.35
232
Las Tres recorded a live performance at the Los Angeles Theater
Center in 1993 and had recorded enough material to shop a compact
disk to labels. However, according to Armendariz Velasquez, the tapes
never saw the light of day because she and Covarrubias could not
afford to buy the master tapes from the recording engineer. The band
had been in hiatus since the mid-1990s, but reunited for El Vez’s 2002
Quinciañera Show and for the Eastside Revue, a reunion of East
Los Angeles boogie and rock n roll bands from the 1940s on, at the
Los Angeles Japanese American Cultural Center in October 2002.
Vexed
Because “the Vex became a center for artistic activity of all kinds”
punk musicians began to interact with visual and performance artists.36
Theresa Covarrubias remembers that the Brat “did a show there with
local artists . . . It was through the Vex that I realized there were a lot
of artists and poets in East L.A.”37 Equally important, for young
Chicanas gathering at Vex, whatever their artistic medium, themes of
sexuality, antiwar protests, and antiracism ran throughout the narratives. In fact, Reyes and Waldman claim that bands like the Brat
. . . produced enough original, exciting material to generate interest in
the band throughout the LA punk underground. It was not long before
punk fans from the West Side [of Los Angeles], maybe some of those
who sneered at Teresa when she traveled to their part of town, came to
see the Brat perform at the Vex38
It can be argued that Chicana/o youth, marginalized by the West Side
rock scene, enticed West Side youth, who refused to see Chicano culture as cosmopolitan, or as worthy of their interest, succeeded in creating integrated places in the most unexpected ways. As Sean Carrillo
claims: “the punk scene had done the impossible. It accomplished
what few cultural movements before had been able to do: it attracted
all people from all over town to see Latino bands, and it brought
musicians from all over the city to . . . deep in the heart of East L.A.39
Covarrubias and Amendariz Velasquez found punk to be an alternative oppositional movement to the Chicano movement, which they
felt excluded from because of their position on gender issues. For these
Chicanas from East L.A. punk subculture was not the end of their
identity formation, but it was a path to a new way of being in the
world and to expose the world to their reality.
233
Pistols Go Chicano, Hendrix Goes Tex
Mex: Plotting New Connections
Understanding U.S. punk within a U.S. Latino/Latin American context
produces exciting news questions, problematics, and contradictions
around analysis of popular musics. Equally important, it challenges
the dominant paradigm framing Chicano Studies. To conclude, I’d like
to return to Pretty Vacant to explore how it problematizes both Pop
Music Studies and Chicano Studies. Pretty Vacant turns on three
narrative strands that finally intersect at the climax of the film. The
first strand involves Molly’s avoidance of her father and his attachment to a nostalgia for Mexico that does not incorporate her (so
refreshingly different from Monteczuma Esparza and Gregory Nava’s
representation of Selena as devoted daughter)—Molly’s dad has
bought her an airplane ticket for the annual family reunion in Mexico
that she does not want to attend: the second strand invokes Molly’s
discovery of a well-kept secret that will allow her, as a producer of
‘zines and a beginning filmmaker, to rewrite rock‘n’roll history by
inserting herself, and Tejano culture; while the third strand involves
Molly’s preparation for a performance of her all girl band called
“Aztlan-a go-go” of which she is the drummer. Molly’s father eventually
catches up to her, and she ends up going to Mexico. But what she finds
is not her father’s version of Mexico viejo, but a dynamic exciting
youth culture composed of rockeros/as (young people who listen to
and make rock en español) who are also concerned with social change.
Broadcast in Los Angeles on Public Television in May 1998, the
film successfully uses humor to deal with usually painful issues,
including: daughters fighting patriarchal constraints; the frustration of
having one’s history erased; and the refusal to recognize the artistic
and intellectual talents of racialized young women in the struggle to
create the conditions for the emergence of a world free from gendered,
racialized, and economic oppression. The film also provokes questions
it does not necessarily address: as the daughter of a Mexican maid and
a working-class Tejano informed by the Chicano movement in its
Texas manifestation, what can Molly, who lives at the geographic
meeting place of Mexico and the United States, and who lives at the
cultural intersection of Steve Jordon (who is known as San Antonio’s
“Chicano Jimi Hendrix of the accordion”) and the Sex Pistols (Jordon
stand for the symbolic intersection of San Antonio’s and London’s
working-class culture)—what can she tell us about this particular cultural moment, about new formations of politics of representation, and
234
how does she speak to unequal economic conditions? What can
Molly’s character, who sees herself in both a local and international
milieu, and recognizes herself as a gendered, racialized, and classed
subject, tell us about transnational popular music and its potential for
a feminist cultural politics, one that Gloria Anzaldúa, Norma Alarcón,
and Sonia Saldívar-Hull specify as a border feminist politics insofar as
it “is a feminism that exists in a borderland not limited to geographical
space . . . that resides in a space not acknowledged by hegemonic culture” and that illuminates the “intersections of the multiple systems of
exploitation: capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy”40
The Molly character offers us a few important insights: that disempowered youth still make their presence felt in the realm of alternative,
though not always oppositional, culture; that rock returns to the
United States from Mexico as rock en español in the hands of
Chicana/o and Mexican youth who themselves are transformed by the
music; that Chicana feminism can not be contained by nationalism
and national boundaries; that all forms of resistance to the values of
the dominant culture have yet to be incorporated, that resistance exists,
albeit not in mass movements, but in local sites; and that ’zines, popular music, and independent film enables conversations to occur across
distant geographical locations between young people whose interests
are not represented by corporate media. Finally, the character of
Molly reminds us that Chicana feminists thinking has enabled the production of this film, and helps us to locate sites of resistance to gendered norms and to the desires of the dominant culture in the most
unexpected places.
Remapping Punk
Pretty Vacant takes place on the West Side of San Antonio during the
early 1990s. It is a setting far removed from both the time and place of
the Sex Pistol’s first fame in the 1970s. Yet, it is Molly’s investment in
rewriting 1980s pop culture that drives her to revise and complicate
circuits of musical diaspora as mapped out by British scholars Paul
Gilroy’s The Black Atlantic and Dick Hebdige’s Subculture: The
Meaning of Style by documenting the “Tejanoizaiton” of the Sex
Pistols music. Always subverting stereotypical expectations of what
constitutes Chicanas’s interest, the most recent issue of her zine is dedicated to punk music. She sets out to prove a secret that will forever
transform rock and roll history: that her favorite British punk band,
the Sex Pistols, had been Chicano-fied by their visit to San Antonio.
235
Molly believes that the Sex Pistol heard Steve Jordon’s funky conjunto
called “El Kranke” and that they were going to do a cover of the song
for their performance. Her current edition of ex-voto Molly’s is dedicated to her two musical obsessions Esteven Jordon (Jimmy Hendrix
of the Accordion) and the Sex Pistols. She is determined to prove that
Chicano music influenced the Sex Pistols during their performance in
San Antonio. As a band that gives her inspiration for thinking about
the world in new ways and for plotting new connections, Molly does
research on the legendary final performance of the Sex Pistols at a
cowboy club in San Antonio called Randy’s. According to Molly, it
was their last and best performance. Snooping around the back stage
of Randy’s she finds a piece of paper:
. . . one hidden behind the stage. Get this—The Sex Pistol s play list! And
even more amazing? Scribbled at the bottom?—Listen to this—“el
Kranke,” someone wrote “El Kranke!” one of Steve Jordon’s songs! Shit
man the Pistol s were gonna end the show that night with some conjunto!
My theory had precedence. Stay with me on this. The Clash, for
instance Jazzed up their music with this reggae influence. A direct
reflection of their exposure to the Caribbean diaspora and its musical
expression there in London. Nothing new—the usual white man appropriation of an exotic other story—anyway, the Pistols, my theory went,
were going to do the same with Norteno, el Tex Mex. I was going on the
assumptions that the Pistols probably heard the conjunto on KCOR or
Radio Jalapeno on the bus ride down from Austin. But the point is, it
worked. Talk about your revisionist histories! Griel Marcus is gonna
flip!41
Inventing her alternatives around British Punk is a response to her limited options circumscribed by Chicano patriarchy and U.S. racism.
Her attraction to British Punk is not about Great Britain, but instead
her desire for an Other—she exoticizes Britain from a Tejana point-ofview. It’s her imaging of Britain as a place where oppositional discourses and styles are produced, styles that she can later mine for their
symbolic potential. But her imaging of Great Britain as a place where
oppositional discourses emerge is not that far off. This reimaging is the
inverse of European youth having their image of the U.S. framed by
oppositional discourses articulated by some hip-hop production.
Molly mentions that the
Clash (acclaimed anti-capitalist punk British band popular in the 80s),
for instance, jazzed up their music with this reggae influence. A direct
236
reflection of their exposure to the Caribbean diaspora and its musical
expression there in London.42
Oppositional discourses emerging in the “Third World” found their
way to Great Britain through the musical milieu of progressive Black
British immigrant and White British youth. Via the imported British
records, Tejana Molly tunes in to the embedded oppositional discourses
layered within the music—but the process of layering oppositional
discourses within the soundings and lyrics of the music does not end
there. Molly narrates the furthering layering of the British sound with
conjunto—with its own oppositional history in Tejas. She explains:
“I was going on the assumptions that the Pistols probably heard the
conjunto on KCOR or Radio Jalapeno on the bus ride down from
Austin. But the point is, it worked.”
For Molly, her zine Ex-Voto, her band, and short films are the places
where she engages what Norma Alarcón describes as the “struggle for
histories actual and imaginary that give substance and provide an
account of her/their position within culture and the political economy.”43
Molly’s art-practices are emblematic of both Chicana feminist art
practices and theoretical writings of the 1980s. She self-publishes the zine
Ex-voto, “cause no one was addressing my needs,” just as Chicana feminist formed organizations like MALCS (Mujeres en Letras y Cambio
Social) and writers and artists created venues for their own work. Molly’s
zine catalogues the influences on her proto-feminist subjectivity. She is
still in-formation. She combines the cut and paste aesthetic of punk with
Chicana rasquache to create a form that expresses her social location
where she prints essays titled, “Never Mind Che, Here’s La Molly,” ironically riffing off the song “Never Mind the Bullocks, Here’s the Sex
Pistols,” while at the same time implicating “Che Guevara,” or at least
the memory of him, in gendered power relations and disrupting
the iconic Che as the signifier of social revolution. That she publishes the
letters responding to zine articles written about “Emma Temayuca, the
history of retablos, Love and Rockets, Maria Felix movies, Dolores
Huerta, Ester Hernandez, the Ramones, and Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz,”
speaks to the ways the circulation of popular art-forms are used to create
community outside of the bounds of ethnicity.
The Emergence of Chicana D.I.Y. Feminist Politics
Molly is linked to an earlier generation of Chicana politics, but the
filmic representation of that connection is done in a complex,
237
antiessentialist manner though the composition of a scene that carefully locates Molly spatially and temporally. On her way to work an
independent record store called Hogwild where she clerks, Molly leads
us through local shots of San Antonio’s Mexicano neighborhoods, the
Alamo, and the cities freeways. At the record store, Molly informs us:
I was born 21 years ago on January 23rd, 1973, a Saturday, the same
day Raza Unida met for their first—and only—national convention, and
across the Atlantic, David Bowie released “Ziggy Stardust:” both
movements didn’t last, a radical Chicano political party and Bowie’s
particular strain of androgynous rock, but both had their influences, on
me, to this day.44
Molly’s birthday, January 23, 1973, is significant in the development
of Chicana politics. In “Mujeres Por La Raza Unida,” Evey Chapa
details the development of the Chicana Caucus in relation to the
January 23 National Raza Unida meeting, a caucus that was formed
by women who felt that more needed to be done to ensure women’s
participation in the party’s electoral politics and positions of power.
Chapa explains,
We used already the evident commitment of many mujeres to the Raza
Unida Party, . . . to implement the strategies for the development of
Mujeres por La Raza Unida . . . a mini-meeting was held in Cristal
(Crystal City Texas) attended by those who felt that words are not
enough, that action is the only possible recourse. We formulated a strategy to discuss and survey the mujer issue with mujeres themselves. We
canvassed opinions throughout the state . . . for five months they
planned . . . On August 4, 1973, in San Antonio, Texas, the first
Conferencia de Mujeres por La Raza Unida was held. It was attended by
almost 200 women from 20 different counties.45
The formation of the Chicana caucus within a larger political
organization was an important move, but by the time Molly comes of
age, the historical conditions that supported mass movements for
social transformation and Civil Rights had changed. Yet Molly is a
subject born out of the difficult struggles that did win important social
advances. And that recognition allows her to narrate herself as being
born of two movements, one concerned with social justice organized
around more traditional electoral politics of the male domain, and the
other concerned with the critique of traditional masculinity located in
the cultural sphere of popular music. Molly recognizes the value of
238
both types of organizing. The lasting effects that the two movements
had on her was to direct her to the realm of cultural politics, a place
where she engages her own cultural work. She finds ammunition
for imagining cultural transformation beyond the frame of cultural
nationalism in the sphere of oppositional punk popular culture. In the
domain of oppositional popular culture, she imagines affiliation with
other marginalized youth who also desire a different world. Yet while
working in the realm women have traditionally been relegated to—
that of the domain of culture reproduction—Molly does not reproduce
traditional Chicano, patriarchal cultural, nor the status quo values of
the dominant culture. She creates something new, just as her flesh and
blood analogues, an alternative public sphere that includes her.
Though corporate media chose not to give coverage to most oppositional movements during the Reagan–Bush era—the historical moment
when the globalization of capital accelerates and conservative political
ideology dominated the public sphere—Molly’s obsession with 1980s
alternative popular culture speaks to the ways young people fashioned
oppositional consciousness then and now out of available resources
found in the most unexpected places.
The film Pretty Vacant was released around the same time as
Selena—the first Hollywood “hit” film to feature a Mexican American
female pop star protagonist. Unlike Selena, with its melodramatic narrative—based on Selena’s real life tragic death, Pretty Vacant at least
engages questions of representation brought up by Chicana feminist
theorists. Like Latina punks Hopey and Maggie, whose lesbian relationship Jaime Hernandez depicts with great sensitivity in the Love
and Rockets series, Mendiola’s Molly represents a grassroots feminist
punk—still in-formation—who draws inspiration from the signs of
British punk, the Love and Rockets series itself, Tejano culture in general, and rock en español, to construct an “alternative” location away
from patriarchal Aztlán, yet still oppositional to the racism of the
dominant culture, a place from which to imagine new ways of being in
the world, ways that speaks to similar, but structurally different
conditions of working-class feminists, both straight and queer.
Again I ask why is this film and its flyer so provocative? My
response is not what one might expect it to be. It is not that the young
Tejana filmmaker is unique in her artistic endeavors, but instead that
the numerous forms of cultural politics invented by Chicanas who
have engaged in subversive art and identity formation have been
under-examined despite the fact that we have much to learn from their
aesthetic and feminist practices. We have yet to understand fully how
they set the stage for a future generation of artists and musicians.
239
What is equally fascinating is the potential for dialogue between
Chicana feminist singer songwriters in the United States and rockeras
from Mexico, who of course, are positioned differently by their
respective nation-states in terms of racial hierarchies and class location,
and whose concerns are certainly not identical. In examining the flow
of youth culture back and forth between Mexico and the United
States, thorny and complex questions of race and class privilege
emerge. Yet, as the musical culture demonstrates, the point of connection, of affiliation between the Chicanas and Mexicanas interested in
transforming gender relations stems from the shared recognition of
their subordinated position within patriarchal culture. Their discursive interventions concerning gender and class relations points toward
the possibility for transnational affiliation around critiques of violence
against women, specifically against mestizas and women of color. The
remarkable work of Julia Palacios and Tere Estrada, on the history of
women in Mexican rock, sets us in that direction.46
Notes
An earlier version of this essay appears in Rockin’ Las Americas: The Global
Politics of Rock in Latin America, edited by Deborah Pacini Hernández and Eric
Zolv (Pittsburg, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press) 2004. I am forever grateful to
Deb Pacini Hernandez, Eric Zolov, and Hector L’Oeste for inviting me to participate in the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Research Residency team, Rockin’ Las
Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin America.
1. Thanks to the following institutions that have funded portions of this project:
Smithsonian Institutions Latino Initiative Fund; the Woodrow Wilson National
Fellowship Foundation Career Enhancement Junior Faculty Postdoctoral
Grant; and the Center for Chicano/Latino Research, UC Santa Cruz. Portions
of this draft have been presented at the following meetings: NACCS 1998; ASA
1999; MLA, 2000; and LASA2000. I thank Lisa Lowe for her wonderful
comments, Rosa Linda Fregoso for Tejana insight, and George Mariscal for
clarifying the nuances of Chicana/o cultural nationalism, and Jocelyn Guilbault
for her excellent suggestions.
2. Mendiola’s flyer is inspired by Yolanda López’s “Portrait of the Artist as the
Virgin of Guadalupe,” 1978.
3. José D. Saldîvar, “Postmodern Realism,” in The Columbia History of the
American Novel, edited by Emory Elliott (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991), 521. See also William A. Nericcio “A Decidedly ‘Mexican and
American’ Semi[ero]tic Transference.” in Latino/a Popular Culture, edited by
Michelle Habell-Pallán and Mary Romero (New York; London: New York
University Press, 2002).
4. See writings by David Reyes and Tom Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances:
Chicano Rock ‘n’ roll from Southern California (Albuquerque: University
240
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
of New Mexico Press, 1998); George Lipsitz, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular
Music, Postmodernism, and the Poetics of Place (London; New York: Verso,
1994); Steven Loza, Barrio Rhythm: Mexican American Music in Los Angeles
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Jose D. Saldívar, Border Matters:
Remapping American Cultural Studies (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997); Musical Migrations: Transnationalism and Cultural Hybridity
in Latin/o America, edited by Frances Aparicio and Candida F. Jaques
(New York: Palgrave Press, 2003); and Curtis Marez, “Becoming Brown: The
Politics of Chicana/o Popular Style,” Social Text 48 (1996).
The limited black and white color spectrum of the photo image itself, because
it cannot represent a visible browness, lends itself to reproducing the
problematic binary terms in which dominant debates about race and power
relations are couched, terms which render invisible the bodies and concerns of
women who are racialzed as neither Black or White (such as mestizas, Native
Americans, Asian Americans) but who are nevertheless positioned in
economic and/or political margins.
Literally, she is Tejana actress and performance artist Mariana Vasquez.
The interviews I conducted are part of a longer in-progress book manuscript
tentively titled, Punk Saints and Other Urban Goddesses which includes an
analysis of interviews with Theresa Covarrubias, and Alicia Armedariz and
other Latinas involved with punk music in Los Angeles during the 1980s. In
the interviews the women discuss their artistic conditions of production,
gender relations and their relation to Chicana feminism, as well as the
Chicana punk aesthetic that emerged in the 1980s.
David Reyes and Tom Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances: Chicano Rock
‘n’ Roll from Southern California (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1998), 135.
Ibid.
For an excellent discussion of how Chicana artists “made do” with limited
resources, see Laura Perez, “Spirit Glyphs: Reimagining Art and Artist in the
Work of Chicana Tlamatinime.” Modern Fiction Studies 44(1) (1998): 36–76.
For an insightful essay on Chicana youth culture of the 1940s, see Catherine
Ramirez, “Crimes of Fashion: The Pachuca and Chicana Style Politics,”
Meridians: A Journal of Transnational Feminisms, 2(2) (2002): 1–35 and
Chicana 1960s youth culture, see Keta Miranda’s, “ ‘The East Side Revue,
40 Hits by East Los Angeles’ Most Popular Groups!: The Boys in the Band
and the Girls Who Were Their Fans,” in this volume.
See George Sanchez’s Becoming Mexican American, Ethnicity and
Acculturation in Chicano Los Angeles 1900–1945 for a history of Chicanos in
Los Angeles. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.
Reyes and Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances, 136.
Ibid., 136.
Alicia Armendariz Velasquez, interview with author, Los Angeles, 1998.
For more on Marisela Norte, see Michelle Habell-Pallán, “No Cultural Icon:
Marisela Norte,” in Women Transforming Politics, edited by Kathy Jones,
Cathy Cohen, and Joan Tronto (New York: New York University
Press, 1997), 256–268.
241
17. For a detailed analysis of Chicana cultural production and Chicana feminist
discourses, Sonia Saldivar-Hull’s Feminism on the Border: Chicana Gender
Politics and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000).
18. AngieChabram-Dernersesian, “I Throw Punches for My Race, but
I Don’t Want to Be a Man: Writing Us—Chica-nos (Girl, Us)/Chicanas—
into the Movement Script,” in Cultural Studies, edited by Lawrence
Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992),
81–95.
19. See David Jones, Destroy All Music: Punk Rock Pioneers of Southern
California. Berkeley: University of California Press.
20. Kristine McKenna, “Female Rockers—A New Breed,” Los Angeles Times,
June, Calendar Section, 78–82.
21. Ibid, 78.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid, 82.
24. Ibid, 78.
25. Alicia Armendariz Velasquez, interview with author, Los Angeles, 1998.
26. Sincere thanks to Jim Fricke, program curator at the Experience Music
Project, for allowing me to access the recording Yes L.A. compilation.
27. See Marc Spitz and Brendan Mullen, We Got the Neutron Bomb: The Untold
Story of L.A. Punk (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001) for varied testimonies of Canterbury’s history.
28. For a discussion of another Chicano artist who finds resources in the most
unexpected places see Michelle Habell-Pallán, “El Vez is ‘Taking Care of
Business’: The Inter/National Appeal of Chicana/o Popular Music,” Cultural
Studies 13,(2) (1999): 195–210.
29. Teresa Covarrubias, interview by author, Los Angeles, 1998.
30. Ibid.
31. McKenna, “Female Rockers,” 82.
32. Reyes and Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances, 139.
33. “Chicanas in Tune.” Produced by Ester Reyes for Life and Times Television.
Copyright Community Television of Southern California. Broadcast on KCET
public television. Los Angeles, 1994.
34. Las Tres, Live at the LATC. Panocha Dulce-Black Rose-Bhima Music, 1993.
Audiocassette. “Happy Accident” written by Alicia Armendariz Velasquez.
Thanks to Antonia Garcia-Orozco for inventing the notion of Chicana Trova
in relation to Nueva Trova, that is Chicana Trova is sung in English and lyrically calls for a consciousness raising through a form of folk music that can be
played on accessible instruments.
35. See Tiffany Lopez’s, The Alchemy of Blood: Violence as Critical Discourse in
U.S. Latina/o Literature (Durham: Duke University Press, in press) and
Angela Davis on incarceration and women of color in her recording, The
Prison Industrial Complex. AK Press, 2000. Compact disk.
36. Reyes and Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances, 136.
37. Ibid.
38. Reyes and Waldman, Land of a Thousand Dances,140.
242
39. Sean Carrillo, “East to Eden” in Forming: The Early Days of L.A. Punk,
coauthored by Sean Carrillo, Christine McKenna, Claude Bessy, and Exene
Cervenka (Santa Monica, CA: Smart Art Press, 1999), 42.
40. Sonia Saldívar-Hull, “Feminism on the Border: From Gender Politics to
Geopolitics,” in Criticism in the Borderlands: Studies in Chicano Literature,
Culture, and Ideology, edited by Hector Calderon and José D. Saldívar
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991): 204, 211.
41. Pretty Vacant, dir Jim Mendiola, 1996. Molly recuperates the great Tejano
“punk” accordion player Steve Jordan into her conceptual map of Chicano
culture. According to Rosa Linda Fregoso, Jordan has generally been left out
in accounts of Tejano oppositional culture—unlike “Little Joe,” a Tejano
musician associated with the movement—because of his heroin addiction and
unconventional lifestyle.
42. Pretty Vacant.
43. Norma Alarcón, “Cognitive Desires: An Allegory of/for Chicana Critics,” in
Chicana (W)rites on Word and Film, edited by Maria Herrera-Sobek and
Helena Maria Viramontes (Oakland: Third Woman Press, 1996), 187.
44. Pretty Vacant.
45. Evey Chapa, “Mujeres Por La Raza Unida,” in Chicana Feminist Thought,
edited by Alma Garcia (New York: Routledge, 1997), 179.
46. See Rockin’ Las Americas: The Global Politics of Rock in Latin America,
edited by Deborah Pacini Hernández and Eric Zolov. (Pittsburgh, PA:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004).
Index
absence/presence 9, 111–12
aesthetic(s)
and cosmetic surgery 138–9
double-function 54
patriarchal capitalism 137–9
postmodern 35–36
punk 223, 227, 236, 240 n. 6
rasquache 201, 236
reworked 21
affirmative action 23, 40, 64, 71
ambivalence 7, 8, 10, 11, 36, 45,
85, 203, 204, 214–15
appropriation
of exotic 235
of political contexts 31–2, 36, 41
subversive 6, 45
assimilation 22, 41, 74
class 23, 82, 88
and colonialism 117
attitude 34–5, 157, 226, 229
blood quantum
153–8, 162
civil rights
California initiative 40
claim 78–9
movement 6–7, 21, 36, 80, 81,
86–8, 175
consumer choice 85
consumption 26–7, 32, 53, 79–80,
83, 85–6, 93, 95–7
disidentification 188
division of labor, sexual
133, 138
feminism(s)
border 234
hegemonic 42, 47 n. 10
homogenizing 38, 68
and nationalism 190, 192 n. 2,
193 n. 8, 234
popular 146
white 68–9, 231
women of color 2, 5
gaze 49, 142, 186, 203, 210,
211, 222
genocide 66
ghostly 10, 111, 122–3
hermeneutics 69
heterosexuality 65, 205 n. 6
compulsive 164
desire 133
lesbianization of 188, 205 n. 6
history 5–6
and Chicano music 15
of Indian women 65–6
feminist (re)imagining of, in the
Chicano movement 172–3,
176, 178, 181–2,
191–2
rock ‘n’ roll 221, 233–4
hybridity
of chicano musical style 15
and commoditization 31–43, 46
hawaiian 159–60
identity
and advertising
93
244
Index
identity—continued
American Indian 65, 73
Chicano/a struggles over 21–6,
178, 180–1
crafting 180
crisis 80–1
essential 199
formation 1, 36, 178, 232
Hawaiian 157–8
lesbian 209
liminal 24
national 165, 198
politics 2
racial 80, 154
sexual 50
imaginary
decolonial 178–9, 181
postcolonial 45
racial and sexual 203, 211–13
imagination, sociological 110
imagined community(ies) 149,
176–7, 193 n. 15
immigration 43, 55–9
indigeneity 73, 163
inscribed bodies 38, 45, 58, 140–1,
145, 159, 162, 185
interpellation 6, 8, 72, 89,
177, 188
intersectionality 5, 7, 173, 225
knowledge
hegemonic 74
objects of 157–61
local 52, 180, 224
fame 20–1, 42
global 147, 148
marketing
body images in 135
“lesbian chic” 53
multiculturalism in 32, 41–4
niche and target 15, 78–80,
84–93, 135, 225
memory
community 166
counter 180
-scape 108, 110, 115
retrofitted 190
mixed race 73–4, 156, 161
nation 39
nationalism
chauvinistic 123–4
Chicano/a 171–4, 190–2
as colonial project 65, 69, 74
pedagogy of 183, 185, 189
US 65–6, 68–9, 73–4
postmodern
celebratory discourses 133–5
multiculturalism 31, 39, 43
sensibilities 36
public sphere 10, 44, 222–5, 238
counter public(s) 177, 190,
193 n. 7
rasquachísmo 203
reification 3, 135, 138, 154, 192
sadomasochism 211–13
sexuality(ies) 35, 50, 52,
144, 227
desire 51, 52
pleasure 136
and political 213–14
and racial 203, 214
spectatorial fantasy 213
violence 225–26
sovereignty 9, 176
and autonomy 6, 69–70, 73
and identity 65
and kinship 166
and self-governance 163
state 96
and capitalism 27
and civil apparatuses 5
and colonialism 165
Index
and identity 21–3, 28 n. 1,
166
non-state entity 73
and power 96, 98 n. 4, 215
and racism 8, 96
and violence 123–5
subject
agency 215
and body 21
colonial/imperial 117,
127 n. 13, 157
constitution of 210
formation 2, 8, 186
nationalist 200
remembering 123
sovereign 96
subjectivity
collective 163
political 8, 27
245
social 7
transgressive 135
subjection 215
subjectification 7, 111, 120, 215
transnationalism
affiliations 239
and capital 32, 53
consumer goods 150 n. 11
and labor 32, 37, 42–3,
137–9
and nafta 226
and popular music 234
warrior 66–7
woman of color 3–5, 7, 149 n. 1
criticism 8
xenophobia
56–7

Beyond the Frame: Women of Color and Visual Representation

Transcription

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